"You are entirely wrong, dear," she said. She was brushing her hair at
the time, and it is rather a pity that it was a profile picture and that
Harvey's pictured eyes were looking off into space--that is, a piece
of white canvas on a frame, used by photographers to reflect the light
into the eyes. For Sara Lee with her hair down was even lovelier than
with it up. "You were wrong. They are different, but they are kind and
polite. And very, very respectful. And he is coming on business."
She intended at first to make no change in her frock. After all, it was
not a social call, and if she did not dress it would put things on the
right footing.
But slipping along the corridor after her bath, clad in a kimono and
slippers and extremely nervous, she encountered a young woman on her
way to dinner, and she was dressed in that combination of street skirt
and evening blouse that some Englishwomen from the outlying districts
still affect. And Sara Lee thereupon decided to dress. She called in
the elderly maid, who was already her slave, and together they went over
her clothes.
It was the maid, perhaps, then who brought into Sara Lee's life the
strange and mad infatuation for her that was gradually to become a
dominant issue in the next few months. For the maid chose a white dress,
a soft and young affair in which Sara Lee looked like the heart of a rose.
"I always like to see a young lady in white, miss," said the maid.
"Especially when there's a healthy skin."
So Sara Lee ate her dinner alone, such a dinner as a healthy skin and
body demanded. And she watched tall young Englishwomen with fine
shoulders go out with English officers in khaki, and listened to a babel
of high English voices, and--felt extremely alone and very subdued.
Henri came rather late. It was one of the things she was to learn about
him later--that he was frequently late. It was only long afterward that
she realized that such time as he spent with her was gained only at the
cost of almost superhuman effort. But that was when she knew Henri's
story, and his work. She waited for him in the reception room, where a
man and a woman were having coffee and talking in a strange tongue.
Henri found her there, at something before nine, rather downcast and
worried, and debating about going up to bed. She looked up, to find him
bowing before her.
"I thought you were not coming," she said.
"I? Not come? But I had said that I would come, mademoiselle. I may
sit down?"
Sara Lee moved over on the velvet sofa, and Henri lowered his long body
onto it. Lowered his voice, too, for the man and woman were staring at
him.
"I'm afraid I didn't quite understand about this afternoon," began Sara
Lee. "You spoke about taking a chance. I am not afraid of danger, if
that is what you mean."
"That, and a little more, mademoiselle," said Henri. "But now that I am
here I do not know."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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