Slowly, in her low, caressing voice, the girl said to him: “Dearest, I adore you.”
III
A Little Love
In the way we live now, the income derived from two million dollars is better than nothing, but, for a duke and a duchess, it is little more. Yet in Paris, provided one know, money may be made to do double the duty that it can effect elsewhere.
Malakoff did know. The last price of anything, the real value of no matter what, he thoroughly understood. It was a boast of his that no one could do him, and apart from the welshings in the steeplechase, it is probable that he had never been jockeyed in his life. On the perhaps meagre income he succeeded, consequently, in setting up an establishment which, if not princely, was not bourgeois. He succeeded even in setting up two of them, one at Deauville for the villégiature, another for town life in the Avenue Malakoff—“my avenue,” as he, with what perhaps was pardonable pride, described it.
The house there or, to speak French, the hôtel, had been obtained at a rental relatively low. Situated between court and garden, it had a vanilla frontage, variegated at the windows by a touch of green, at the balcony by another of pink, which gave it vaguely the appearance of a Neapolitan ice.
Sally did not take to it nor did she take to her existence there. In the unholy rites of the marriage, each one of which had set a separate mark upon her, she felt cheated of her girlhood and, in this house, she felt cheated, too, of happiness and love. Many are without suspecting it, many others cheat themselves. But Sally had been thrown blindfolded into the arms of a man who did not care for her, who did not want to care for her, and she had been so thrown for no other earthly reason than that a stupid woman might be related to a duke. Sally hated her mother for it with a hatred which equalled, when it did not exceed, the loathing which she felt for her husband.
Ordinarily the results of a husband’s inconsiderateness are but temporary. Given but time and the bride forgets and forgives, and Sally, who was not only shallow, but, like all shallow people, impulsive, might have ended by loving the man whom she loathed, had not his inconsiderateness been succeeded by defection. Barely a wife, she ceased to be one, and that, while distinctly a blessing, aborted the possibility of anything further between them, anything, that is, except indifference on his part and antipathy on hers.
Her thoughts at this time were not, therefore, very gay, and their lack of gaiety was complicated by the fact that she had not many of them. But she found compensations, among these a curious one in Mme. Oppensheim, who, for obvious reasons, had determined that Sally should like her, and who succeeded in that which, other things being equal, would have been an impossible task. Sally did like her, or perhaps it will be more exact to say that she relished the attentions shown her by this woman of the world, who, not content with being merely gracious to an inexperienced American, took the trouble to form her, to teach her the tone, the ways and manners of the Parisian, in particular that désir de plaire which gives to the speech and bearing of the mondaine her untranslatable charm.
Sally at first was necessarily unaware of the relations that existed between this woman and Malakoff. When she was better informed, as she promptly became, she felt grateful to her for standing between them.
The gratitude was very feline. Though Sally purred, she could scratch. But meanwhile discovering, moreover, as she also did, that in the special world in which she moved, the situation, far from being exceptional, was the reverse, she felt not merely grateful but Parisian, and in that state of advancement, dispensed both with the sense of dignity which should be natural to the married woman, and with the sense of morality which usually is instinctive in the young.
Incidentally it amused her to be duchess. She was glad to be rid of her mother. She liked to drive without her, and view landscapes of modes. Moreover, in the Avenue Malakoff, she received detachments from what is called All-Paris—the glittering and rakish ship of fashion, in which the distaff-side of the Faubourg Saint-Germain does not always deign to sail. But though the feminine portion of the old nobility has its reserves, the men are less punctilious and even otherwise there are always others quite as agreeable and frequently more so, the cosmopolitan leaders of life and sport, who nowhere else are as enterprising. Of these, many made up to her, a circumstance of which, quaintly enough, she complained to Mme. Oppensheim.
“But, ma toute belle,” the latter remonstrated. “When a man delays more than fifteen minutes in making up to me, I regard him as insulting.”
“You are so beautiful,” Sally replied. But she thought her simply fantastic, and that not through any straight-lacedness, but because she did not yet understand how a woman can permit any man, save the man of all men, to attempt an approach however circuitous, to the heart’s tender places. In that respect, Malakoff’s treatment of her had been beneficial, and while in the antipathy incited, it had necessarily failed to reveal what love may be, none the less it had suggested possibilities which were then accentuated by Welden’s presence in Paris.
Prior to her marriage, she had fancied herself in love with him. Now, in looking back, she realised that she had not known the meaning of the word. It still held its secrets, mysteries unrevealed, the esoteric love of a doctrine which only life can impart, only life and a lover. But the latter term had also its shadings, between which Sally wavered, not through any
