THE arrival in Paris, where she was to pass some months, of a friend of Damier’s, Lady Surfex, a charming, capable woman whose husband was his nearest friend, was the means of casting a further and still more lurid light upon Claire’s character and Madame Vicaud’s past.

Damier wished to bring Madame Vicaud and Lady Surfex together. He had plans, and was vastly amused to realize that they were of a quite paternal character. These plans did not go beyond the thought that a widening of Claire’s life might be an excellent thing for her, and, as a result, a happy thing for her mother. To see Claire well, safely, happily married, would not this be the lifting of a problem from the mother’s heart? As yet he had not gone further and told himself that it would leave the mother’s heart freer for the contemplation of other problems. Now Claire’s chances of a prosperous marriage would certainly be multiplied if he could bring around her and her mother a few such friends as Lady Surfex. He spoke to her, on his first visit to her, of the Vicauds, and of his wish that they might meet. “The charming Clara Chanfrey!” Lady Surfex said. (With what a chime all allusions to Clara Chanfrey always began, to end with such funereal tolling!) “Ah, you make me feel how old I am becoming, for how often in my girlhood I heard my mother speak of her! She always spoke severely. Mother belonged to the old rÉgime, you know—saw things steadily, and saw them whole, perhaps, but rather narrowly, and only one thing at a time. She couldn’t take in, as it were, the extenuations of circumstance. And she was a great friend of Lady Chanfrey’s. Lady Chanfrey infected all her allies with her own bitterness. But the memory of the daughter’s charm came through it. She was like her father, not like her mother. I never liked the little I remember of Lady Chanfrey. But I have heard of Madame Vicaud since I used to hear of her from mother, and, I am sorry to say, more and more sadly.”

“All I hear of her is sad,” said Damier. “Every echo from her past is a groan!”

“Poor woman!” Lady Surfex mused. “First the awful husband, and then the, to say the least of it, trying daughter.”

Damier’s heart stiffened. “Trying? In what way—I may ask?”

“Of course you may—you know them so well; and, as I see, your sympathy is all with the mother. Well, I am afraid she is altogether trying, but the instance of which I was thinking deserves a severer adjective. Some friends of mine in Cheshire, nice, quiet people, had always kept more or less in touch with Madame Vicaud during her stormy life. They did not meet, but they sometimes wrote. Mrs. Barnett and she had been friends in girlhood. Claire, when she grew up, went to stay with them. Very beautiful, very clever, singing wonderfully, yet, from the beginning, she struck a false note. And then there was the ugly little story: a young man, Captain Dauncey, fell madly in love with her; they were engaged; and, within hardly a month’s time, she jilted him openly and brazenly for a better match. That was only the beginning. Sir Everard Comber was madly in love, too, but Mrs. Barnett told me that they felt that he knew there was no good metal under her glamour; the glamour was so great that he hoodwinked himself. It was tragic to see him trying not to see. And one day he and Mrs. Barnett found Mademoiselle Vicaud engaged in a flirtation in an arbor, indolently allowing an adoring young man to kiss her hand, his arm around her waist. Mrs. Barnett said that it was the most unpleasant of situations—poor Sir Everard’s face, the girl’s look of dismay, followed by an instant assumption of coolness. She was able, almost at once, to show a humorous, half-vexed, half-tolerant smile, and to pretend that she expected them to share her playful anger against the hugely embarrassed culprit. She behaved, afterward, very badly about Sir Everard’s breaking off the engagement, which he did most delicately and generously. She had no dignity; she was furious, and showed that she was. She even hinted once—only once, but it was enough—at a breach-of-promise suit and damages.

“Madame Vicaud appeared in the midst of the commotion, and quenched in a moment the ugly flicker of vulgarity. The Barnetts guessed that there must have been a terrible scene between the two, but Madame Vicaud carried off her daughter, completely quelled, it seemed. She could not save the situation; she merely made it tragic instead of odious. That is the story,” said Lady Surfex, after a pause in which Damier, with a whitened face, kept a sick silence—“only the story, after all, of a vulgar girl who makes her mother piteous.

“I should love to meet Madame Vicaud. She does not know that I know, nor, I think, does the girl. The best thing, I fancy, would be if the girl could be married off to somebody who understood—and didn’t mind. Don’t you think so? Could we try to help Madame Vicaud like that?”

Damier could not think just now of Claire’s future; he was thinking, persistently, of Madame Vicaud—seeing her as a white flower sunken up to the brave and fragile petals in mud. The past clung to her in her daughter—greedy, husband-hunting, lax, and vulgar. What must the tortured mother’s heart have felt at this heaping of shame upon her proudest head? How, more and more, he understood, and interpreted, her silences, her reserves!

In a dry voice he said that he could hardly hope for any possible atonement to Madame Vicaud.

“Have I been wrong in telling you—ungenerous?” asked Lady Surfex.

“No; right. It makes one more able to help her; or, at least, to feel where she most needs help. It is only in lifting the daughter that one can help her.”

“We will lift her!” said Lady Surfex, with a glance at his absorbed face. “And then, if we do,—right out of the mother’s life,—what will she do alone?”

“She would never allow her to be lifted out of her life.”

“Well, only in the literal sense of going away to live with her husband.”

“Her husband! It seems a difficult thing to find her one!”

“Not so much to find one—she is enchanting in appearance, I hear—as to keep one. But no doubt she is wiser, better, now. And would you, Eustace, live on in Paris indefinitely if the girl married and left her mother alone? Is your friendship so absorbing?”

He was able to look at her now with a smile for her acuteness.

“Quite so absorbing.”