The friendly conspiracy of chatter, Jane thought as they crossed the sun-washed court, had never faltered. The illusion of the “party” had been consistently sustained. The two foolish old people, she reflected, as they climbed the grey stone steps of the museum, had not been left alone for an hour to think or to worry. The children had been kind and capable and very, very clever. There had been no emotional moments, no awkward discussions, no embarrassing contretemps. They were carrying it all off beautifully. They would carry it all off beautifully until the end.
Nevertheless, Jane had felt during the last five days that she would have been glad of an hour in which to think or not think, worry or not worry, as she chose. An hour, perhaps, in which to look at Paris, without the tinkling accompaniment of the friendly conspiracy of chatter.
They entered the main gallery.
“We’ve got to hurry,” said Cicily.
Jane thought how much she wished that she were entering the main gallery alone. It looked just as she remembered it. The walls were hung with the same fine Gobelin tapestries. The familiar bronze and marble figures stood on their pedestals. Jane had not seen them for twenty years, but she remembered them well. Stephen and Albert were conscientiously buying catalogues. Cicily had paused before a case of Sèvres china. A rough-hewn Rodin arrested Jane’s attention. But Jane had not come to the Luxembourg to look at the Rodins. Jane had come to the Luxembourg for quite another purpose. She moved away from Cicily and strolled casually to the corner where André’s Eve awaited her. Jane stared up at her. She stood smiling provocatively over her yet untasted apple—an Eve still innocent, yet subtly provocative. Jane gazed in silence at her rounded cheeks, at the fresh virginal curves of her parted lips. Could it be possible, Jane was thinking, that she had ever looked like that? That she had ever smiled like that? Could it be possible that she had ever been anything so fresh and young and fair and inexperienced? Stephen and Cicily turned up at her elbow. Jane was conscious of a quick fear that Cicily would recognize that smile, that Stephen would comment on it. But Stephen was glancing up at the Eve with a look of complete indifference. Jane suddenly realized that Stephen had quite forgotten that it was a Duroy. But Cicily had opened her catalogue.
“It’s awfully vieux jeu, isn’t it?” she was saying calmly. “He’s nice, though. I met him at Cousin Flora’s.”
Albert slipped his arm through Jane’s. “There are some good paintings,” he was saying, “but most of them have been moved to the Louvre.”
Jane passed at his side from the entrance hall to the farther galleries. She wandered, blindly, past a succession of canvases. Cicily’s light prattle fell unheeded on her ears. An hour later, when they stood once more in the entrance hall, Jane could not remember one single painting that she had seen in the Luxembourg.
“Come look at the gardens,” Albert was saying. “They’re really charming.”
“You go without me,” said Jane. “I’m a little tired.”
“It won’t take a minute,” said Albert brightly.
“I’ll wait here,” said Jane.
Stephen and Cicily and Albert moved toward the door. From the grey light of the entrance hall, Jane watched them descend the stone steps in the dazzling sunlight of the Paris afternoon. She walked slowly back to the Eve. “There is something of you in all my nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas,” she was thinking. “Something you brought into my life. Romance, I guess. Nothing more tangible.”
She had been young once, thought Jane, as she stood staring up at the Eve. She had been fresh and fair and inexperienced. She had smiled like that. Twenty-three years ago, Stephen himself had recognized that smile. Absurd, ridiculous, however, that fleeting fear that Cicily would recognize it now!
Jane wondered vaguely what Eve had looked like after thirty years with Adam. After Cain and Abel had disappointed her. Why had no one ever thought of doing Eve at the age of fifty-one? Cicily’s light voice broke in upon her revery. Jane turned with a start.
“I wonder who she is, Mumsy?” said Cicily.
“Who—she is?” faltered Jane.
“Yes,” said Cicily brightly. “They say that all those rather saccharine ladies of his are someone, Mumsy. They’re a record of his sentimental journey. His wife’s the Venus in the Metropolitan. He did it the year he was married. I think”—Cicily’s blue eyes gleamed experimentally—“I think it would be rather nice to be loved by an artist who would recreate you and preserve you forever in words or paint or marble. Though I suppose you’d grow up and beyond his idea of you and then you’d want to throw a brick at what he’d done. It must give lots of André Duroy’s old girls a pain to look at what he once thought they were. You’d wonder, you know, if you ever had been anything so silly. And you’d fear you had. One’s always silly, Mumsy, when one’s in love. Which is quite as it should be. But the silliness should be ephemeral. It shouldn’t be perpetuated in words or paint or marble, any more than it is in life. Don’t you think so, Mumsy?”
Jane’s eyes were still
