Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/252

 waiting to surprise you. As an artist he waits apart so not to take your mind from your work. He will tell you how great is your success this night. With him beside you, you will love New York. You will see its beauty. You will wish to remain."

"Hah!" tossed Simone to him over her shoulder as she leaned comfortably against Vermillion. "What stupidity! One would think that I am sick for days on the ship only to come in search of this one. Well, let us at least offer him a glass of champagne—but examine carefully the bottle to be assured it is not the jus de pomme offered us at rehearsal."

Jacques padded out happily, certain now that, with her lover present, Simone would not insist on returning immediately to Paris before he had been able to accumulate some dollars.

Simone's face became an accusing mask. A tear from her eye rolled down Paul's cheek as she pushed from him and groped on the dressing table for a handkerchief, refusing his. His wave of affection was being held off, and he didn't know what to say first. That was part of the incomprehensibility of the love relationship: intimacy made communication not less but more difficult; almost any innocent word might lead to recrimination. You had to choose the right word and it never was right. She sure was keyed up, and working herself up to a j'accuse torrent. As the Elizabethan poet said, "For God's sake, hold your tongue and let us go to bed."

Simone, leaning toward the mirror of the dressing table and discovering that mascara had settled in a fine line under her eyes, sighed deeply at this further evidence of aging. Then she recalled having once noted in the Tuileries that an ill child too had lines under its eyes. Hers was but a temporary disfigurement remediable with rest which now she could have in Paul's love. His occasional brutalities, as in leaving her alone in Brussels, were those of unthinking masculine youth. One must forgive the self-indulgent child he sometimes was, as now waiting for her to speak first. But she would grant him this largesse since he had returned of his own volition, which was an asking of pardon. Yet was it not of a great callousness that he should expect not only to be received but to find her living after the brutal manner in which he had left her alone in Brussels and where she might have drowned in the torrential gutter when, distraught, searching for him, she slipped and fell? If not for the derelict who, thinking her dead, had turned her over searching for plunder, she might be dead. But one could not tell him of this, not now. With him one had to weigh every word, a fault of his 240