"Oh, all I know about it is what the dancing teacher used to make us do
in the convent-school I went to in Bayonne; walk into a room, pretend
to greet somebody, step into a make-believe carriage and out of it, sit
down with him for a talk; and first he'd pretend to be a girl like you,
and then he'd pretend to be an older woman, and then he'd pretend to be
a man (only of course he really was that), and you'd have to have the
right manner for each one.... All that kind of foolishness, you know."
"No, I don't know!" cried Eugenia angrily.
The cab drew up and stopped. "I suppose we're theah," said Eugenia, "you
tell him to wait till we come out."
She was cautiously silent during the introduction to Mme. de la Cueva,
and during the hour of the lesson. But if she gave her tongue little
employment, she kept her eyes busy, absorbing every detail of the long,
bare room, with its four long windows opening on a balcony overlooking
the little, dank, unkempt Jardin de Cluny. After the lesson, Mme. de la
Cueva stepped into another room to get some music, and Marise, rather
pale with fatigue, walked wearily out on the balcony for a breath of
fresh air. Eugenia sprang to follow her, as if she had been wishing to
do this, and had not known if it were allowable. But before she looked
down on the medieval building below them she said in a whisper to
Marise, "You're dog-tired. Why, I wouldn't work that hard for _any_body!
And for that fat old dowd!"
Marise looked down at her astonished. "I'm not working for _her_!" she
exclaimed. But this was, evidently, from the look of Eugenia's face a
fourth dimensional remark for her, for she made no answer, turning
instead to look at the gray-black old mass of Cluny.
"What is it?" Eugenia asked.
Marise had not yet wholly emerged from a struggle with an exercise which
she had not been able to execute with the inhuman, neat-fingered
velocity demanded by Mme. de la Cueva. The hour in that other world to
which music always transported her had broken the continuity of her
impressions of her new friend. She stared rather blankly at Eugenia's
question, and looked from her to the well-known medieval pile below
them. It did not for the instant occur to her, that the other girl did
not recognize what the building was. The turn of her phrase suggested an
inquiry about the architecture, and though she had never thought about
Cluny before, the look of it stirred recollections of a certain fierce
history teacher, whose specialty had been the transitions of the reign
of Louis XII. She looked down on the stone lacework opposite, and said
doubtfully, "What is it? Domestic Gothic, shouldn't you think? But some
of it pretty late. Those square dormer-windows are Louis Douze, aren't
they?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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