DAMIER was able, while waiting for them in the salon on the following day, to see more clearly Madame Vicaud’s environment, now that it was empty of her. It was one of work, poverty, and refinement. Books lined one side of the walls; the furniture was of the scantiest, simplest description; a row of old prints—after Sir Joshua and Gainsborough, some of them very good—were hung straightly above the simple writing-table; on this table stood a small pot of pink flowers, and on a large table near the center of the room were books, reviews, and a work-box; the harp and the grand piano dominated the room. The high windows did not overlook the street, but the branches, flecked still with gold and russet autumn leaves, of an old garden. Turning from this outlook, Damier found his attention fixed by a large photograph that occupied a prominent place in a black frame upon a sedate cabinet near the window. It was the photograph of a man—of Monsieur Vicaud, Damier knew at once. He gazed long at the face, still young, yet showing already touches of decay and degradation in the poetry and beauty of its youth. Without these touches—of presage more than actuality—it might have been the face of a Paolo, with tossed-back hair and superb, unfettered throat. Monsieur Vicaud had evidently been one of the few men whom a Byronic disarray becomes. Damier saw in the face the enchantment that had deluded Clara Chanfrey, and hints of the horror that had wrecked all enchantment. The longer one looked at the ardent, dreamy eyes, the perfect lips,—helpless, as it were, before one, and unable in charm of change to divert one’s attention from their essential meaning,—the more one felt cruel selfishness, hard indifference, and lurking evil. Instinctively he turned and walked away from Monsieur Vicaud as he heard footsteps outside.

When the mother and daughter came in together, he could infer, even more clearly than from the bareness of the salon, from Madame Vicaud’s shabby furs and unfashionable wrap, that life, to be kept up at all with niceness and finish, must be something of a struggle for them; yet, with her small black bonnet, which she was tying with black gauze ribbons beneath her chin, her neat gloves, the poise of her shoulders, and her swift, light step, she was still unmistakably une ÉlÉgante. It was natural, he supposed,—though feeling some resentment at such naturalness,—that the struggle should be the mother’s mainly; the law of maternal self-sacrifice perhaps demanded it. Claire was charmingly dressed, simply, and with a Parisienne’s unerring sense of harmony and fitness. She was neither shabby nor unfashionable; the fashion, too, expressed her, not itself.After all, she still, though she was no longer une toute jeune fille,—she must be twenty-seven,—had her life before her, and her achievement of pretty clothes could hardly be imputed as blame to her.

The early November afternoon in the Bois was misty, with sunlight in the mist; the air was mild. Madame Vicaud’s dark eyes looked down the long vistas, seeing, perhaps, other figures in them, other pictures. Damier and Mademoiselle Vicaud talked of Italy. She had never been there, but she questioned him about Florence and Rome, and Madame Vicaud asked him if he had heard much of the old church music; and the music had been his greatest enjoyment. Madame Vicaud was fond of Palestrina, she said; but she said little of the fondness, and only listened with a half-detached, half-assenting smile while Claire and the young man went on from Gluck to Wagner. Mademoiselle Vicaud was full of admiration—though her admirations were always unemphatic—for the latter; but Madame Vicaud, though retaining, evidently, no lurking survivals of taste for the operatic music of her youth, would own only to a tempered liking for the great opera-master. She mused lightly over Damier’s demand for her preferences, and inclined to think that opera never meant much to her; it was a form of art that offended her taste almost inevitably; its appeal to the eye could so rarely justify itself, and the music, of course, was restricted by its being pinned down to definite descriptive themes.

Claire hummed out, in a melancholy, emotional contralto, a phrase from “Tristan.” “I can’t sing him—none of our French throats can; but he fills me, sweeps me up; that is all I ask of music. Mamma likes music to lift her; I like it to carry me away.” Among the deep, almost purple reds of her hair, the tawny luster of her coiling furs, her cheeks, in the keen, fresh air, glowed dimly. “No, I could not sing Wagner,” she sighed; “but I could sing. I am an artiste manquÉe; the one, perhaps, for being my father’s daughter, the other for being my mother’s. She would rather have me teach—try to force a little of my own energy and feeling into dough-like souls—than have me sing in public.” Mademoiselle Vicaud’s smile had no rancor as she made these statements, and her mother’s distant gaze showed no change, nor did she speak.

“It is a hard and a rather tawdry life, that of an opera-singer,” said Damier; “and, I fancy, almost an impossible one in Paris.”

“Ah, but I am tawdry,” Claire observed. If antagonism there had ever been on this subject, it had evidently long since left behind it the stage of discussion. Claire made no appeal or protest—merely stated facts.

“You see,” she went on, very much as if she and Damier were alone together, “if it were not for that artist nature, Mamma would not, perhaps, mind so much. It is because I am not—what shall we call it?—respectable? hein?—well, that will serve—that she dreads such tests for me.”

Damier now saw that, though Madame Vicaud’s silence kept all its calm, she very slightly flushed. He felt in her a something, proud and shrinking, that steeled itself to hear the jarring note of her daughter’s jest; and was it a jest? Again the contrast in the two faces struck him, this time with something of fundamental alienation in the contrast. It occupied his mind after Madame Vicaud, very unemphatically, not at all as if she felt that it needed turning, took the lead of the conversation, and while Claire, leaning back in her corner, listened with, when she was particularly addressed, her indolent “Ah!” It was, indeed, like going from one world to another to look from her mother’s face to hers. Already he felt for her a mingling of irritation and pity that was to grow as he knew her better.

How strangely she was tainted with something really almost canaille; the soft depth of her voice reeked with it. And how strangely blind must the affection of the mother be that could bridge the chasm that separated her from her daughter, unconscious—her evident devotion to her proved that—of its very existence.