Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/222

 Madame Shane's drawing room and envied it. . . all of them, Madame de Cyon, the Comptesse de Turba, Madame Marchand, the mysterious old Madame Blaise, who people said had been a famous beauty in her youth; Geneviève Malbour, who wrote novels as dowdy as herself and struck the literary note; even the rich Duchesse de Gand, who frequented the royalist soirées and the parties given by the chic Jews, and only came occasionally to Madame Gigon to placate her husband whose title was created by the first Napoleon. They attempted to imitate the seductive, quiet beauty of Numero Dix but they failed somehow, perhaps because they could not resist introducing a pillow of just the wrong, violent shade or a pair of rubber plants, or some monstrous piece of furniture from the period of the Second Empire.

"This American" had outdone them, quite without striving or effort. Indeed if the success of Lily's drawing-room had depended upon either of these things it would have remained forever as ugly as on the day she moved into it, to succeed a chocolate manufacturer whose growing prosperity led him to a small palace in the new German style on the Avenue de Jena. She was incapable of effort. If she had been poor, if she had been forced to work, she would have become sloven; even her beauty would have deteriorated and grown sloppy through neglect. It was money which stood between her and these disasters. . . money which permitted her to enter a shop and say, "I will have this and this and this for my drawing-room," money which permitted her to enter any salon of the Rue de la Paix and say, "I will have this gown, or this one, or this," money which permitted her to go to the hairdresser, Augustine, and say, "I will have my hair waved and my complexion treated." And having been born with taste, she made no errors.

Although the friends of Madame Gigon spoke of her as "the American," it is seldom that they thought of her as a foreigner. Only her indolence and her extravagance could have betrayed to a stranger the fact that she was not a true Frenchwoman. In the seven years that followed the death of her mother, Lily abandoned forever all thought of returning to America. She spoke French to perfection, indolently and gracefully, with a