Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/487

 impregnable castle as she herself was in it. Yet the feeling persisted that this was the world of Nino, Simone, and Vermillion, a world at whose door you would have to knock like a beggar to even glimpse its meaning in three short days.

Maybe everyone feels like this about Paris at first, an outsider.

She pulled her fingers down the thick folds of the window's darkgold brocade drapes and then along the patina of curved bergères and table legs. She examined the worn medallioned grey-blue silk upholstery, the flower-striped chintz walls, the marble mantelpiece, and a brass clock duplicating in arabesques the gilded chandeliers and candelabra. A room so much more intimate and richer than those at the Athenée.

A setting for love. No place to be by yourself. What was Vermillion's room like?

"Monsieur would like Mademoiselle to join him in the bar," the femme de chambre said discreetly.

She thinks Beman my lover! The only love affair he's ever had is with his stomach. All that grumbling about how "dull" the train trip was, and how he couldn't wait until "one can fly." Lunch in New York, dinner in Paris, and call a prince by his first name—what no nickname!—that's Beman's ideal. I'm mean. But who cares only about "chic" restaurants, shows, and dressmakers?

The bar sparkled, the restaurant shone, the night clubs glittered. Not so different from home but more lush and of course real French, which meant worse in some ways, better in others.

"I'm tired, I want to sleep," she protested when Beman hinted at peephole spectacles. "It's no thrill to me to watch others make love, I'm a big girl now."

Her head swam as she sank into feathers. Vagrant taxis tooted, a carriage rattled over cobbles, two muffled but outraged voices rose and faded into endless debate through drawn curtains. I never knew anything could be as soft as this bed.

But ancient humors ghouled the room and she sprang from the bed, shaking. After switching the light on and off she returned to bed to lie sleepless.

In a room like this he had loved Simone. Maybe this very minute, or they were lying exhausted side by side. Could he, walking out on Simone as he had in New York, make love to her again? And would Simone let him? Yes. As she herself had let Hugh make love after Rh