“But you know it’s different; everybody is so bigoted there. A girl hasn’t the chance to meet the same sort of men, even if there were any. Everybody just watches everything you do.”
“So they do here,” said her mother. “That Mr. Weicker just stopped me in the hall; he saw you come in with John, and he talked to me about how you must keep out of the bar, you were so young. I told him you only took lemonade, but he said it didn’t matter; scenes like tonight made people leave the hotel.”
“Oh, how perfectly mean!”
“So I think we better go back home.”
The empty word rang desolately in Fifi’s ears. She put her arms around her mother’s waist, realizing that it was she and not her mother, with her mother’s clear grip on the past, who was completely lost in the universe. On the sofa her brother snored, having already entered the world of the weak, of the leaners together, and found its fetid and mercurial warmth sufficient. But Fifi kept looking at the alien sky, knowing that she could pierce it and find her own way through envy and corruption. For the first time she seriously considered marrying Borowki immediately.
“Do you want to go downstairs and say good night to the boys?” suggested her mother. “There’s lots of them still there asking where you are.”
But the Furies were after Fifi now—after her childish complacency and her innocence, even after her beauty—out to break it all down and drag it in any convenient mud. When she shook her head and walked sullenly into her bedroom, they had already taken something from her forever.
II
The following morning Mrs. Schwartz went to Mr. Weicker’s office to report the loss of two hundred dollars in American money. She had left the sum on her chiffonier upon retiring; when she awoke, it was gone. The door of the apartment had been bolted, but in the morning the bolt was found drawn, and yet neither of her children was awake. Fortunately, she had taken her jewels to bed with her in a chamois sack.
Mr. Weicker decided that the situation must be handled with care. There were not a few guests in the hotel who were in straitened circumstances and inclined to desperate remedies, but he must move slowly. In America one has money or hasn’t; in Europe the heir to a fortune may be unable to stand himself a haircut until the collapse of a fifth cousin, yet be a sure risk and not to be lightly offended. Opening the office copy of the Almanack de Gotha, Mr. Weicker found Stanislas Karl Joseph Borowki hooked firmly on to the end of a line older than the crown of St. Stephen. This morning, in riding clothes that were smart as a hussar’s uniform, he had gone riding with the utterly correct Miss Howard. On the other hand, there was no doubt as to who had been robbed, and Mr. Weicker’s indignation began to concentrate on Fifi and her family, who might have saved him this trouble by taking themselves off some time ago. It was even conceivable that the dissipated son, John, had nipped the money.
In all events, the Schwartzes were going home. For three years they had lived in hotels—in Paris, Florence, St. Raphael, Como, Vichy, La Baule, Lucerne, Baden-Baden and Biarritz. Everywhere there had been schools—always new schools—and both children spoke in perfect French and scrawny fragments of Italian. Fifi had grown from a large-featured child of fourteen to a beauty; John had grown into something rather dismal and lost. Both of them played bridge, and somewhere Fifi had picked up tap dancing. Mrs. Schwartz felt that it was all somehow unsatisfactory, but she did not know why. So, two days after Fifi’s party, she announced that they would pack their trunks, go to Paris for some new fall clothes and then go home.
That same afternoon Fifi came to the bar to get her phonograph, left there the night of her party. She sat up on a high stool and talked to the barman while she drank a ginger ale.
“Mother wants to take me back to America, but I’m not going.”
“What will you do?”
“Oh, I’ve got a little money of my own, and then I may get married.” She sipped her ginger ale moodily.
“I hear you had some money stolen,” he remarked. “How did it happen?”
“Well, Count Borowki thinks the man got into the apartment early and hid in between the two doors between us and the next apartment. Then, when we were asleep, he took the money and walked out.”
“Ha!”
Fifi sighed. “Well, you probably won’t see me in the bar any more.”
“We’ll miss you, Miss Schwartz.”
Mr. Weicker put his head in the door, withdrew it and then came in slowly.
“Hello,” said Fifi coldly.
“A-ha, young lady.” He waggled his finger at her with affected facetiousness. “Didn’t you know I spoke to your mother about your coming in to the bar? It’s merely for your own good.”
“I’m just having a ginger ale,” she said indignantly.
“But no one can tell what you’re having. It might be whisky or what not. It is the other guests who complain.”
She stared at him indignantly—the picture was so different from her own—of Fifi as the lively center of the hotel, of Fifi in clothes that ravished the eye, standing splendid and unattainable amid groups of adoring men. Suddenly Mr. Weicker’s obsequious, but hostile, face infuriated her.
“We’re getting out of this hotel!” she flared up. “I never saw such a narrow-minded bunch of people in my life; always criticizing everybody and making up terrible things about them, no matter what they do themselves. I think it would be a good thing if the hotel caught fire and burned down with all the nasty cats in it.”
Banging down her glass, she seized the phonograph case and stalked out of the bar.
In the lobby a porter sprang to help her, but she shook her head and hurried on through the salon, where she came upon Count Borowki.
“Oh, I’m so furious!” she cried. “I never saw so many old cats! I just told Mr. Weicker what I thought of them!”
“Did someone dare to speak rudely to you?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. We’re going away.”
“Going away!” He started. “When?”
“Right away. I don’t want to, but mamma says we’ve got to.”
“I must talk to you seriously about this,” he said. “I just called your room. I have brought you a little engagement present.”
Her spirits returned as she took the handsome gold-and-ivory cigarette case engraved with her initials.
“How lovely!”
“Now, listen; what you tell me makes it more important that I talk to you immediately. I have just received another letter from my mother. They have chosen a girl for me in Budapest—a lovely girl, rich and beautiful and of my own rank who would be very happy at the match, but I am in love with you. I would never have thought it possible, but I have lost my heart to an American.”
“Well, why not?” said Fifi, indignantly. “They call girls beautiful here if they have one good feature. And then, if they’ve got nice eyes or hair, they’re usually bow-legged or haven’t got nice teeth.”
“There is no flaw or fault in you.”
“Oh, yes,” said Fifi modestly. “I got a sort of big nose. Would you know I was Jewish?”
With a touch of impatience, Borowki came back to his argument: “So they are bringing pressure to bear for me to marry. Questions of inheritance depend on it.”
“Besides, my forehead is too high,” observed Fifi abstractedly. “It’s so high it’s got sort of wrinkles in it. I knew an awfully funny boy who used to call me ‘the highbrow.’”
“So the sensible thing,” pursued Borowki, “is for us to marry immediately. I tell you frankly there are other American girls not far from here who wouldn’t hesitate.”
Fifi snapped the cigarette case open and shut.
“Mamma would be about crazy,” Fifi said.
“I’ve thought about that too,” he answered her eagerly. “Don’t tell her. In Switzgerland we’d have to wait a week according to the law. But if we drove over the border into Liechtenstein tonight we could be married tomorrow morning. Then we come back and you show your mother the little gilt coronets painted on your luggage. My own personal opinion is that she’ll be delighted. There you are, off her hands, with social position second to none in Europe. In my opinion, your mother has probably thought of it already, and may be saying to herself: ‘Why don’t those two young people just take matters into their own hands and save me all the fuss and expense of a wedding?’ I think she would like us for being so hard-boiled.”
He broke off impatiently as Lady Capps-Karr, emerging from the dining room with her Pekingese, surprised them by stopping at their table. Count Borowki was obliged to introduce them. As he had not known of the Marquis Kinkallow’s defection the other evening, nor that His Lordship had taken a wound over the Simplon pass the following morning, he had no suspicion of what was coming.
“I’ve noticed Miss Schwartz,” said the Englishwoman in a clear, concise voice. “And of course I’ve noticed Miss Schwartz’s clothes.”
“Won’t you sit down?” said Fifi.
“No, thank you.” She turned to Borowki. “Miss Schwartz’s clothes make us all appear somewhat drab. I always refuse to dress elaborately in hotels. It seems such rotten taste. Don’t you think so?”
“I think people always ought to look nice,” said Fifi, flushing.
“Naturally. I merely said that I consider it rotten taste to dress elaborately, save in the houses
