Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
The gigolo with the beautiful manners hesitated longer than really
beautiful manners should permit. But finally, "Je m'appelle Gedeon
Gore." He pronounced it in his most nasal, perfect Paris French. It
didn't sound even remotely like Gideon Gory.
"My name's Hubbell," said Mary, in her pretty fair French. "Mary
Hubbell. I come from a little town called Winnebago."
The Gore eyebrow expressed polite disinterestedness.
"That's in Wisconsin," continued Mary, "and I love it."
"_Naturellement_," agreed the gigolo, stiffly.
They finished the dance without further conversation. Mrs. Hubbell had
the next dance. Mary the next. They spent the afternoon dancing, until
dinner time. Orson J.'s fee, as he handed it to the gigolo, was the kind
that mounted grandly into dollars instead of mere francs. The gigolo's
face, as he took it, was not more inscrutable than Mary's as she watched
him take it.
From that afternoon, throughout the next two weeks, if any girl as
thoroughly fine as Mary Hubbell could be said to run after any man, Mary
ran after that gigolo. At the same time one could almost have said that
he tried to avoid her. Mary took a course of tango lessons, and urged
her mother to do the same. Even Orson J. noticed it.
"Look here," he said, in kindly protest. "Aren't you getting pretty
thick with this jigger?"
"Sociological study, Dad. I'm all right."
"Yeh, you're all right. But how about him?"
"He's all right, too."
The gigolo resisted Mary's unmaidenly advances, and yet, when he was
with her, he seemed sometimes to forget to look sombre and blank and
remote. They seemed to have a lot to say to each other. Mary talked
about America a good deal. About her home town ... "and big elms and
maples and oaks in the yard ... the Fox River valley ... Middle West ...
Normal Avenue ... Cass Street ... Fox River paper mills...."
She talked in French and English. The gigolo confessed, one day, to
understanding some English, though he seemed to speak none. After that
Mary, when very much in earnest, or when enthusiastic, spoke in her
native tongue altogether. She claimed an intense interest in European
after-war conditions, in reconstruction, in the attitude toward life of
those millions of young men who had actually participated in the
conflict. She asked questions that might have been considered
impertinent, not to say nervy.
"Now you," she said, brutally, "are a person of some education,
refinement, and background. Yet you are content to dance around in
these--these--well, back home a chap might wash dishes in a cheap
restaurant or run an elevator in an east side New York loft building,
but he'd never----"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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