The Café de Paris was pleasant at that hour, with sunset drooping through the yellow awnings and the red parasols as through stained glass. Glancing about, Nicole saw the young woman she had encountered that morning. She was with a man now, and Nelson placed them immediately as the young couple they had seen in Algeria, almost three years ago.
«They’ve changed,» he commented. «I suppose we have, too, but not so much. They’re harder-looking and he looks dissipated. Dissipation always shows in light eyes rather than in dark ones. The girl is tout ce qu’il y a de chic, as they say, but there’s a hard look in her face too.»
«I like her.»
«Do you want me to go and ask them if they are that same couple?»
«No! That’d be like lonesome tourists do. They have their own friends.»
At that moment people were joining them at their table.
«Nelson, how about tonight?» Nicole asked a little later. «Do you think we can appear at the Goldings’ after what’s happened?»
«We not only can but we’ve got to. If the story’s around and we’re not there, we’ll just be handing them a nice juicy subject of conversation. . . . Hello! What on earth—«
Something strident and violent had happened across the café; a woman screamed and the people at one table were all on their feet, surging back and forth like one person. Then the people at the other tables were standing and crowding forward; for just a moment the Kellys saw the face of the girl they had been watching, pale now, and distorted with anger. Panic-stricken, Nicole plucked at Nelson’s sleeve.
«I want to get out. I can’t stand any more today. Take me home. Is everybody going crazy?»
On the way home, Nelson glanced at Nicole’s face and perceived with a start that they were not going to dinner on the Goldings’ yacht after all. For Nicole had the beginnings of a well-defined and unmistakable black eye—an eye that by eleven o’clock would be beyond the aid of all the cosmetics in the principality. His heart sank and he decided to say nothing about it until they reached home.
III
There is some wise advice in the catechism about avoiding the occasions of sin, and when the Kellys went up to Paris a month later they made a conscientious list of the places they wouldn’t visit any more and the people they didn’t want to see again. The places included several famous bars, all the night clubs except one or two that were highly decorous, all the early-morning clubs of every description, and all summer resorts that made whoopee for its own sake—whoopee triumphant and unrestrained—the main attraction of the season.
The people they were through with included three-fourths of those with whom they had passed the last two years. They did this not in snobbishness, but for self-preservation, and not without a certain fear in their hearts that they were cutting themselves off from human contacts forever.
But the world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility. They found that there were others in Paris who were only interested in those who had separated from the many. The first crowd they had known was largely American, salted with Europeans; the second was largely European, peppered with Americans. This latter crowd was «society,» and here and there it touched the ultimate milieu, made up of individuals of high position, of great fortune, very occasionally of genius, and always of power. Without being intimate with the great, they made new friends of a more conservative type. Moreover, Nelson began to paint again; he had a studio, and they visited the studios of Brancusi and Leger and Deschamps. It seemed that they were more part of something than before, and when certain gaudy rendezvous were mentioned, they felt a contempt for their first two years in Europe, speaking of their former acquaintances as «that crowd» and as «people who waste your time.»
So, although they kept their rules, they entertained frequently at home and they went out to the houses of others. They were young and handsome and intelligent; they came to know what did go and what did not go, and adapted themselves accordingly. Moreover, they were naturally generous and willing, within the limits of common sense, to pay.
When one went out one generally drank. This meant little to Nicole, who had a horror of losing her soigné air, losing a touch of bloom or a ray of admiration, but Nelson, thwarted somewhere, found himself quite as tempted to drink at these small dinners as in the more frankly rowdy world. He was not a drunk, he did nothing conspicuous or sodden, but he was no longer willing to go out socially without the stimulus of liquor. It was with the idea of bringing him to a serious and responsible attitude that Nicole decided after a year in Paris, that the time had come to have a baby.
This was coincidental with their meeting Count Chiki Sarolai. He was an attractive relic of the Austrian court, with no fortune or pretense to any, but with solid social and financial connections in France. His sister was married to the Marquis de la Clos d’Hirondelle, who, in addition to being of the ancient noblesse, was a successful banker in Paris. Count Chiki roved here and there, frankly sponging, rather like Oscar Dane, but in a different sphere.
His penchant was Americans; he hung on their words with a pathetic eagerness, as if they would sooner or later let slip their mysterious formula for making money. After a casual meeting, his interest gravitated to the Kellys. During Nicole’s months of waiting he was in the house continually, tirelessly interested in anything that concerned American crime, slang, finance or manners. He came in for a luncheon or dinner when he had no other place to go, and with tacit gratitude he persuaded his sister to call on Nicole, who was immensely flattered.
It was arranged that when Nicole went to the hospital he would stay at the appartement and keep Nelson company—an arrangement of which Nicole didn’t approve, since they were inclined to drink together. But the day on which it was decided, he arrived with news of one of his brother-in-law’s famous canal-boat parties on the Seine, to which the Kellys were to be invited and which, conveniently enough, was to occur three weeks after the arrival of the baby. So, when Nicole moved out to the American Hospital Count Chiki moved in.
The baby was a boy. For a while Nicole forgot all about people and their human status and their value. She even wondered at the fact that she had become such a snob, since everything seemed trivial compared with the new individual that, eight times a day, they carried to her breast.
After two weeks she and the baby went back to the apartment, but Chiki and his valet stayed on. It was understood, with that subtlety the Kellys had only recently begun to appreciate, that he was merely staying until after his brother-in-law’s party, but the apartment was crowded and Nicole wished him gone. But her old idea, that if one had to see people they might as well be the best, was carried out in being invited to the De la Clos d’Hirondelles’.
As she lay in her chaise longue the day before the event, Chiki explained the arrangements, in which he had evidently aided.
«Everyone who arrives must drink two cocktails in the American style before they can come aboard—as a ticket of admission.»
«But I thought that very fashionable French—Faubourg St. Germain and all that—didn’t drink cocktails.»
«Oh, but my family is very modern. We adopt many American customs.»
«Who’ll be there?»
«Everyone! Everyone in Paris.»
Great names swam before her eyes. Next day she could not resist dragging the affair into conversation with her doctor. But she was rather offended at the look of astonishment and incredulity that came into his eyes.
«Did I understand you aright?» he demanded. «Did I understand you to say that you were going to a ball tomorrow?»
«Why, yes,» she faltered. «Why not?»
«My dear lady, you are not going to stir out of the house for two more weeks; you are not going to dance or do anything strenuous for two more after that.»
«That’s ridiculous!» she cried. «It’s been three weeks already! Esther Sherman went to America after—«
«Never mind,» he interrupted. «Every case is different. There is a complication which makes it positively necessary for you to follow my orders.»
«But the idea is that I’ll just go for two hours, because of course I’ll have to come home to Sonny—«
«You’ll not go for two minutes.»
She knew, from the seriousness of his tone, that he was right, but, perversely, she did not mention the matter to Nelson. She said, instead, that she was tired, that possibly she might not go, and lay awake that night measuring her disappointment against her fear. She woke up for Sonny’s first feeding, thinking to herself: «But if I just take ten steps from a limousine to a chair and just sit half an hour—«
At the last minute the pale green evening dress from Callets, draped across a chair in her bedroom, decided her. She went.
Somewhere, during the shuffle and delay on the gangplank while the guests went aboard and were challenged and drank down their cocktails with attendant gayety, Nicole realized that she had made a mistake. There was, at any rate, no formal receiving line and, after greeting their hosts, Nelson found her a
