“But you’ve got to go at once,” said Paulette, laughing but firm; “here is my friend—isn’t she beautiful? We’ve too many things to discuss without being bothered by you.”
“Paulette has these fits of cruelty,” said one of the three, a short, stocky fellow with an ugly, sensitive face. “She’d have made a good Nero. But anyway I’m glad I stayed long enough to see you. Don’t let her hide you from us altogether.” Another man made a civil remark; the third one standing back in the gloomy room said nothing, but the girl caught the impression of tallness and blondness and of a pair of blue eyes which stared at her intently. She felt awkward and showed it.
“See, you’ve made her shy,” said Paulette accusingly. “I won’t bother introducing them, Angèle, you’ll meet them all too soon.” Laughing, protesting, the men filed out, and their unwilling hostess closed the door on them with sincere lack of regret. “Men,” she mused candidly. “Of course we can’t get along without them any more than they can without us, but I get tired of them—they’re nearly all animals. I’d rather have a good woman friend any day.” She sighed with genuine sincerity. “Yet my place is always full of men. Would you rather have your chops rare or well done? I like mine cooked to a cinder.” Angela preferred hers well done. “Stay here and look around; see if I have anything to amuse you.” Catching up an apron she vanished into some smaller and darker retreat which she called her kitchen.
The apartment consisted of the whole floor of a house on Bank Street, dark and constantly within the sound of the opening front door and the noises of the street. “But you don’t have the damned stairs when you come in late at night,” Paulette explained. The front room was, Angela supposed, the bedroom, though the only reason for this supposition was the appearance of a dressing-table and a wide, flat divan about one foot and a half from the floor, covered with black or purple velvet. The dressing table was a good piece of mahogany, but the chairs were indifferently of the kitchen variety and of the sort which, magazines affirm, may be made out of a large packing box. In the living room, where the little table was set, the same anomaly prevailed; the china was fine, even dainty, but the glasses were thick and the plating had begun to wear off the silver ware. On the other hand the pictures were unusual, none of the stereotyped things; instead Angela remarked a good copy of Breughel’s Peasant Wedding, the head of Bernini and two etchings whose authors she did not know. The bookcase held two paper bound volumes of the poems of Béranger and Villon and a little black worn copy of Heine. But the other books were highbrow to the point of austerity: Ely, Shaw and Strindberg.
“Perhaps you’d like to wash your hands?” called Paulette. “There’s a bathroom down the corridor there, you can’t miss it. You may have some of my favourite lotion if you want it—up there on the shelf.” Angela washed her hands and looked up for the lotion. Her eyes opened wide in amazement. Beside the bottle stood a man’s shaving mug and brush and a case of razors.
The meal, “for you can’t call it a dinner,” the cook remarked candidly, was a success. The chops were tender though smoky; there were spinach, potatoes, tomato and lettuce salad, rolls, coffee and cheese. Its rugged quality surprised Angela not a little; it was more a meal for a working man than for a woman, above all, a woman of the faery quality of Paulette. “I get so tired,” she said, lifting a huge mouthful, “if I don’t eat heartily; besides it ruins my temper to go hungry.” Her whole attitude toward the meal was so masculine and her appearance so daintily feminine that Angela burst out laughing, explaining with much amusement the cause of her merriment. “I hope you don’t mind,” she ended, “for of course you are conspicuously feminine. There’s nothing of the man about you.”
To her surprise Paulette resented this last statement. “There is a great deal of the man about me. I’ve learned that a woman is a fool who lets her femininity stand in the way of what she wants. I’ve made a philosophy of it. I see what I want; I use my wiles as a woman to get it, and I employ the qualities of men, tenacity and ruthlessness, to keep it. And when I’m through with it, I throw it away just as they do. Consequently I have no regrets and no encumbrances.”
A packet of cigarettes lay open on the table and she motioned to her friend to have one. Angela refused, and sat watching her inhale in deep respirations; she had never seen a woman more completely at ease, more assuredly mistress of herself and of her fate. When they had begun eating Paulette had poured out two cocktails, tossing hers off immediately and finishing Angela’s, too, when the latter, finding it too much like machine oil for her taste, had set it down scarcely diminished. “You’ll get used to them if you go about with these men. You’ll be drinking along with the rest of us.”
She had practically no curiosity and on the other hand no reticences. And she had met with every conceivable experience, had visited France, Germany and Sweden; she was now contemplating a trip to Italy and might go to Russia; she would go now, in fact, if it were not that a friend of hers, Jack Hudson, was about to go there, too, and as she was on the verge of having an affair with him she
