Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/255

 He became aware of Figente's voice calling discreetly, "Are you decent?"

"Snap out of it," he ordered. Automatically she jerked upright at the makeup table and, dabbing her face which she could see the drug was revivifying, exerted herself to carol "Come in, come in" as Vermillion turned the key and opened the door. Figente's upturned nostrils sniffed the distraught air.

"Simone has been waiting for you and I was about to leave when there was a slight accident," Vermillion explained, resentful of Figente's patent curiosity, and also of Lucy's candid eyes at this awkward moment. Unwavering, probing eyes, like those above Greek Orthodox altars. Having to pretend anything he did not feel always put him off but he could not walk out without a word, and that certainly belonged to Simone.

"You'd better put some oil on that burn right away." He put his hand lightly on her hair.

"It is nothing. It will be gone tomorrow. Telephone me when you are free," she said in that casual tone which had become their signal in Paris to meet later in her apartment.

A time, Vermillion thought moodily as he walked home, not four years past, when the lingering bouquet of the era of Simone's prewar youth had distilled intoxicatingly for him dazzling essences of the Paris of yesterdays. Simone had fascinated him, still did, with the modes and manners she wore with such elegance. But these were of yesterdays and, in her femme fatale behavior, smothering. It was as if in her person she piled layer over layer of mode and manner petticoats of second Empire romantics à la George Sand down to Mata Hari. She was too often the crime passionelle heroine of a Sardou stageset. Sardoodledum, as Shaw had characterized it. And Iris March was the same. He had lived with Simone long enough in that past world. She wouldn't, perhaps couldn't, come over into the present. The past lived only if it continued into the present. Between them was the chasm, not of the unimportant difference in their physical ages, but her inability to move beyond a certain point in artificial time. In the end it had taken New York with its thrusting stony contrasts of light and shade to reveal the chasm between Simone's world and his. Her Paris was a footlight one, Pucciniesque, with shadows of images left over from past worlds posing as persons. The world which exists makes its own images. Gauthier's Mimi originally was Rh