Circus -- Fiction; Clowns -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Veterans -- Fiction
Also, when they walked abroad, she dressed with neatness. Her hair, a
stringy bush at home, appeared a miracle of coiffure. Lips and eyes
received punctilious attention. The perfection of her high-heeled shoes was
a matter of grave concern. Whatever may have been underneath, the outside
of her toilette received anxious care. She thought much of externals.
Andrew came within her purview. She did her best to remodel his outer man
more in accordance with his prosperity; but what woman can have sartorial
success with the man who is the tailor's despair?
Lackaday is pathetically insistent on her manifold virtues. She retains
all through the years her street-child's swift intelligence. She has
_flair_. She predicts instinctively the tastes of varying audiences.
She has a vivid imagination curiously controlled by the most prosaic common
sense. He rarely errs in taking her advice.... To her further credit
balance, she is more saving than extravagant. Bits of jewellery please her,
but she does not crave inordinate adornment. When he buys a touring-car for
the greater comfort of their vagrant life, she is appalled by the cost and
upbraids him with more than a touch of shrewishness. Her tastes do not rise
with her position. She would sooner have a _chou-croûte garnie_ than
a fore-quarter of Paris lamb or a duck _à la presse_. She could never
understand why Andrew should pay four or five francs for a bottle of wine,
when they could buy a good black or grey for three sous a litre. On tour
gaieties were things unthought of. But during periods of rest, in Paris,
she cared little for excitement. With an income relieving her from the
necessity of work, she would have been content to lounge slipshod about the
house till the day of her death.
Once Andrew, having to entertain, for politic reasons, the director of
a Paris music-hall, took her to the Café de Paris. The guest, in a
millionaire way, had suggested that resort of half-hungry wealth. Modest
Andrew had never entered such a place in his life; nor, naturally, had
Elodie. Knowing, however, that one went there in full dress, he disinterred
a dress-suit which he had bought three years before in order to attend
the funeral of a distinguished brother artist, and sent Elodie with a
thousand-franc note to array herself in an adequate manner, at the Galeries
La Fayette. Elodie's economical soul shrank in horror from the expenditure,
at one fell swoop, of a thousand francs. She bought God knows what for less
than half the money.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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