Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/257



O she talked for what must have seemed to Lily hour upon hour. When the younger woman betrayed any sign of leaving, Madame Blaise thrust her tall thin body between her and the door. Even if Lily had desired to speak she would have found small opportunity, for Madame Blaise never once stopped talking. It was as if all the talk of years, repressed and hidden, was suddenly rushing forth in a torrent. The room became intolerably stuffy from the burning gas. Lily's head began to ache and her face to grow more and more pale. If she had been less pleasant by nature she would have made her way by force past the old woman and out into the open air. As it was, she kept hoping, no doubt, that Madame Blaise would come to an end of her talk, that some one would come in and interrupt her. . . the maid perhaps. . . any one. She no longer heard what Madame Blaise was saying. The talk came to her in fragments, the inexpressibly boring chatter of a cracked old woman. To break the monotony she took up the pictures on the mantelpiece and began to examine them. During a brief pause, she observed. "Your pictures are interesting, Madame Blaise. I should like to call again when I have more time, in order to see them all."

"Ah, yes," said the old woman. "So they are . . . so they are. The men . . . they were not all lovers you understand. But I might have had them for lovers by the raising of my finger."

"This one," said Lily, holding up the portrait of a heavily built man wearing the mustachios of a dragoon. "He is interesting."

"Yes . . . yes. He was a Spaniard . . . a nobleman, very aristocratic. Dead now. . . . Extraordinary how many of them are dead!"

Then all at once the attention of Madame Blaise was