He reflected that Fran had an unsurpassed show-window display but not much on the shelves inside.
Then he was angry with himself; then he pitied her; then loved her for her childish shrillness of make-believe, her eagerness to be noticed and admired.
He wished they were going to see more of Mrs. Cortright. He felt that she really belonged to this puzzling, reticent thing called Europe and that she might make it clear to him.
Sam was surprised, felt rather guilty, to find that he was becoming more a master of the nervous art of travel than Fran. In Paris she had been supreme; had taken to language and manners and food hectically, while he stood outside. And she still insisted that he couldn’t understand Italian waiters and shopping and lace shawls and cathedrals as she could. But while she was daily becoming more uncertain, he was daily developing more of a sure purpose in travel.
He was going back to make some such a “development” as the Sans Souci Gardens, and contemplating it he was becoming conscious that there was such a thing as architecture. Details that once he would never have noticed became alive: hand-wrought iron balconies, baroque altars, tiled roofs, window shutters, copper pans in kitchens seen from the street. He began, shyly keeping it from Fran, to sketch doorways. He began, in the evenings of hotel tedium, to read stray notes on architecture—guidebook introductions, articles in copies of Country Life found in the hotel—instead of newsstand detective stories.
It made him increasingly eager to be out each morning and to see new things, to collect knowledge; and somehow, increasingly, it was he who planned where they should go, he who was willing to confer with concierges and guides, and it was Fran who followed him.
The contrast between Fran and Mrs. Cortright kept annoying him. He was not very well pleased to see that after twenty-four years of living with Fran he had not in the least come to know her.
Always, particularly when they had first come abroad, he had considered her clearly superior to other American women. Most of these others, he had grunted to himself, were machines. They sobbed about babies and dressmakers and nothing else. They were either hard-voiced and suspicious, or gushing. Their only emotion was a hatred of their men, with whom they joyously kept up a cat and mouse feud, trying to catch them at flirtation, at poker-playing. But Fran, he had gloated, had imagination and flair and knowledge. She talked of politics and music; she laughed; she told excited stories; she played absurd pleasant games—he was the big brown bear and she the white rabbit; he was the oak and she the west wind who ruffled his foliage—and she did it, too, until he begged mercy. She never entered a drawing-room—she made an entrance. She paused at the door, dramatic, demanding, stately in simple black and white, where other women hesitated into a room, fussy and tawdry. And they glowered, those other women, when Fran gathered in the men and was to be heard talking with derisive gaiety about tennis, Egyptian excavations, Bolshevism—everything in the world.
He had been so proud of her!
And in Paris, at first—how different her devouring of French life from the flatness of the American women whom he heard in restaurants croaking, in tinny, Midwestern voices, “Mabel says she knows a place in Paris where she can buy Ivory Soap, but I’ve found one where I can get Palm Olive Soap for seven cents a cake!”
Ah, he had rejoiced, not of these was his Fran—swift silver huntress, gallant voyager, shrewd critic, jubilant companion!
And now, however he cursed himself for it, he could not down the wonder whether she really was any of these poetic things—whether she didn’t merely play at them. He could never root out suspicion, planted when he had read her letter about Deauville and Arnold Israel, that she was in heart and mind and soul an irresponsible child. And the minute he was pleased with the bright child quality in her, the irresponsibility annoyed him. … Bobbing at cherries is not so pretty a sport at forty-three.
A child.
Now she was ecstatic—a little too demandingly ecstatic for his unwieldiness to follow her—over a moonlit sea, a tenor solo, or a masterpiece of artichoke cookery. Half an hour later she was in furious despair over a hard bed, a lukewarm bath, or a missing nail-file; and Sam was always to blame, and decidedly was to be told about it. He was to blame if it rained, or if they could not get a table by the window in a restaurant; it was not her tardy dressing but his clumsiness in ordering a taxi which made them late for the theater.
She was a child in her way of preening herself over every attractive man who looked interestedly at her along the journey—now that she had been converted to salvation by passion. And she was equally a child in laughing at, in forgetting, the older and less glittering men who were kind to them on trains and friendly at hotels. She forgot so easily!
Sam was certain that she had forgotten Arnold Israel. He identified certain Paris letters, with a thick, black, bold script, as Israel’s. At first she was jumpy and secretive about them; then, in a month, she let them lie unopened. And once, apropos of a gesticulating operatic baritone, she began making fun of Israel’s ardors. … He would almost have been gladder, Sam sighed, if she had enough loyalty to remember Arnold longer.
She was lovely quicksilver, but quicksilver is hard for a thick hand to hold.
A child!
He noted, too, her pretentiousness when she was with people like Mrs. Cortright. Fran let it be known that she herself was of importance. She rebuked people who—never having seen her before—failed to know that she was an expert at tennis, French and good manners. She didn’t exactly say it, but
