Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/340



Paris, May, 1905.

… p-s-st! Allen!" called Marthe Tollet, as Marise passed through the glass-covered verandah, on her way to the street door. In her haste to stop Marise, she used the abrupt surname hail which the girls thought so very chic and truly English, which the older teachers forbade as rude and barbarous, a typical manifestation of the crumbling down of civilized French ways under the onslaught of modern Anglo-Saxon roughness.

"Eh bien, the little Tollet, what is it?" asked Marise in the same vernacular, pausing in front of the concierge's door. Marthe left the Swedish ladder, where she was twisting her flexible young body in and out of the rungs, and coming up to Marise remarked casually, "Oh, I just thought maybe you'd like to go to the dormitory and see that little compatriot of yours. She's crying like everything, la pauvre, and nobody can do a thing with her."

"The pretty little girl with blonde hair?" asked Marise, somewhat vague as to the younger girls in the lower classes. "What's the matter with her?"

"A perfectly horrible attack of homesickness, they say. The English teacher is up there—she's the only one who can talk to her; but you know how likely the MacMurray will be to put balm on a sore heart, eh? And you could make a wooden man split his sides laughing, once you get started. You could cheer her up."

Marise hesitated, looked in at the clock in the concierge's loge, and nodded. She started towards the door of the dormitory building, stopped and called back, "O là, the little Tollet, what's her name?

"Eugénie," said the other, "Eugénie Mille."

As she climbed the dark, winding, well-waxed stairs, Marise 332