Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/270

 that should only be uttered intimately, children delighting to make peepee in public. The Claudel is not chic, but one does not ask chic of the Medici Venus whom she resembles, but with the straightness of American girls. This cannot have escaped Paul, but even if he has painted her there would be something of me in her portrait. She is unlike the other American girls observed, a child who always has been a woman.

Simone creamed and wiped her face and in the mirror regarded the unadorned image upon which she began to construct Simone Calvette. At least I have created for myself an interesting character since youth has left me, she concluded philosophically. At her age I too must have been beautiful. And of a naivete, with my voice so carefully placed, and fresh from the Conservatoire. Yet it was not my pure girlish tones that made me a success but my lost voice. She brushed her hair vigorously, training its waves over a finger. Then she took from a jeweled patch box in her purse a small folded paper, from it she tapped a tiny snowy mound onto the back of her hand, and inhaled deeply, shaking her head back. Humming lightly, she tidied the dresser top.

Perhaps I will take her with me to Paris. Now in the Rond Point strewn with autumn leaves fat black and white Bretonne nursemaids and lean navy-blue English nannies are hurrying home well-bred charges. The populace from the workers' districts and small shopkeeper suburbs are withdrawing thoughtfully from their Sunday glimpse of the high life and soon it will be twilight and the many moons among the trees will illumine only what is around their fluted bases.

One can see in her eyes that the girl is amenable. When was it I first became amenable to this substitute for love? At dinner with Andre at Fouquet's, with myself as his final truffle. He was of a tiresomeness unendurable, and across the room the girl sat with another Andre. Our eyes met in a caress. I never saw her again. Paul, Paul, you have made other men impossible for me. The little Claudel will be I and I will be you loving me.

The wave of despair again washed through her. What indescribable pleasure to feel oneself falling from the great height of this window. No, no—that is an impulse when bored, when not even anger or unhappiness roused any feeling and one craved an ultimate in sensation. For that I am not quite ready.

She opened the door with a frown of disapproval at the 258