They promenaded for a few minutes longer in silence, each preoccupied with anxious speculations regarding a future which began already to loom heavy as a thundercloud charged with unloosed lightnings.
From moment to moment the handsome woman beside him glanced through the open windows of the music room, where her younger sister and the girl Philippa were still busily interested in working out accompaniments to the old-time songs.
Philippa sang "J'ai perdu ma beaute":
"I have lost my beauty-- Fate has bereft me, Fortune has left me, None owes me duty.
I have lost my lover; I shall not recover. Our Lady of Lorraine, Pity my pain!"
They paused to listen to this naive melody of other days, then strolled on.
Madame de Moidrey said:
"She is very interesting, your little friend from Ausone."
"I am glad you think so."
"Oh, yes, there is no doubt about her being clever and intelligent.... I wonder where she acquired her aplomb."
"Would you call it that?"
Madame de Moidrey smiled:
"No, it is a gentler quality--not devoid of sweetness. I think we may label it a becoming self-possession.... Anyway, it is a quality and not a trait--if that pleases you."
"She has quality."
"She has a candor which is almost disturbingly transparent. When I was a girl I saw Gilbert's comedy, 'The Palace of Truth.' And actually, I believe that your little friend, Philippa, could have entered that terrible house of unconscious self-revelation without any need of worrying."
"You couldn't praise her more sincerely if you think that," he said. "She offers virgin soil for anybody who will take any trouble with her."
"Oh," said Madame de Moidrey, laughing, "I thought I was to engage her to aid me and amuse _me_; but it seems that _I_ have been engaged to educate her in the subtler refinements of civilized existence!"
"Don't you want to?" asked Warner, bluntly.
"Dear friend of many more years than I choose to own to, have I not enough to occupy me without adopting a wandering _caissiere de cabaret_?"
"Is that the way you feel?" he said, reddening.
"Don't be cross! No; it isn't the way I feel. I do need a companion. Perhaps your friend Philippa is not exactly the companion I might have dreamed about or aspired to----"
"If you look at it in that way----"
"Jim! Don't be rude, either! I desire two things; I want a companion and I wish to oblige you. You know perfectly well I do.... Besides, the girl is interesting. You didn't expect me to sentimentalize over her, did you? You may do that if you like. As for me, I shall consider engaging her if she cares to come to me."
"She will be very glad to," he said, coolly.
Madame de Moidrey cast a swift side glance at him, full of curiosity and repressed amusement.
"Men," she said, "are the real sentimentalists in this matter-of-fact world, not women. Merely show a man a pretty specimen of the opposite sex in the conventional attitude of distress, and it unbalances his intellect immediately."
"Do you imagine that my youthful friend Philippa has unbalanced my intellect?" he asked impatiently.
"Not entirely. Not completely----"
"Nonsense!"
"What a bad-mannered creature you are, Jim! But fortunately you're something else, too. For example, you have been nice about this very unusual and somewhat perilously attractive young girl. Few men would have been so. Don't argue! I have known a few men in my time. And I pay you a compliment."
She stopped and leaned back against a weatherworn vase of stone which crowned the terrace parapet.
"Listen, Jim; for a woman to take into her house a young girl with this girl's unknown antecedents and perfectly well-known past performances ought not to be a matter of romantic impulse, or of sympathy alone. What you tell me about her, what I myself have already seen of her, are sufficient to inspire the interest which all romance arouses, and the sympathy which all lonely youth inspires. But these are not enough.
"Choice of companionship is a matter for serious consideration. You can't make a companion of the intellectually inferior, of one who possesses merely the lesser instincts, of any lesser nature, whether cultivated to its full extent or otherwise. You know that. We shun what is not congenial."
He looked at her very intently, the dull red still flushing his face; and she surveyed him critically, amiably, amused at his attitude, which was the epitome of everything masculine.
"What are you going to do about her?" he inquired at last.
"Offer to engage her."
"As what?"
"A companion."
"Oh. Then you _do_ appreciate her?"
Madame de Moidrey threw back her pretty head and laughed with delicious abandon.
"Perhaps I don't appreciate her as deeply as you do, Jim, but I shall humbly endeavor to do so. Now, suppose, when you go back to the Golden Peach, you send Philippa's effects up here, and in the meanwhile I'll begin my duty of finishing Philippa's education--for which duty, I understand, I'm engaged by you----"
"Ethra, you are a trump! And I don't really mind your guying me----"
"Indeed, I'm not guying you, dear friend! I'm revealing to you the actual inwardness of this entire and remarkable performance of yours. And if you don't know that you are engaging me to finish this young girl's education while you're making up your mind about your sentiments concerning her, then it's time you did."
"That is utterly----"
"Please! And it's all the truer because you don't believe it! ... Jim, the girl really _is_ a pathetic figure--simple, sweet, intelligent, and touchingly honest.... And I'll say another thing.... God knows what mother bore her, what parents are responsible for this young thing--with her delicate features and slender body. But it was not from a pair of unhappy nobodies she inherited her mind, which seems to seek instinctively what is fine and right amid the sordid complexities of the only world she has ever known.
"As for her heart, Jim, it is the heart of a child--with one heavenly and exaggerated idol completely filling it. _You!_ ... And I tell you very plainly that, if I were a man, the knowledge of this would frighten me a little, and make me rather more serious than many men are inclined to be."
He bit his lip and looked out across the southern valley, where already the August haze was growing bluer, blurring the low-hanging sun.
She laid a friendly, intimate, half humorous hand on his arm:
"In all right-thinking men the boy can never die. No experience born of pain, no cynicism, no incredulity acquired through disappointment, can kill the boy in any man until it has first slain his soul. Otherwise, chivalry in the world had long since become extinct.
"You have done what you could do for Philippa. I am really glad to help you, Jim. But from now on, be very careful and very sure of yourself. Because now your real responsibility begins."
He had not thought of it in that way. And now he did not care to.
To sympathize, to protect, to admire--these were born of impulse and reason, which, in turn, had their origin in unconscious condescension.
To applaud the admirable, to express a warm concern for virtue in difficulties, meant merely sincere recognition, not the intimacy of that equality of mind and circumstance which existed per se between himself and such a woman as Madame de Moidrey.
The very word "protection" implies condescension, conscious or unconscious. We may love what we protect; we never, honestly, place it on a pedestal, or even on a mathematical level with ourselves. It can't be done.
And so, in a vague sort of way, Warner remained incredulous of the impossible with which Madame de Moidrey had smilingly menaced him.
Only, of course, she was quite right; he must not thoughtlessly arouse the woman in the girl Philippa.
But there is nothing in the world that ought more thoroughly to arouse the best qualities of manhood in a man than the innocent adoration of a young girl. For if he could really believe himself to be even a shadow of what she believes he is, the world might really become the most agreeable of residential planets.
As Warner and Madame de Moidrey entered the music room through the open French windows, Philippa turned from the piano and her soft voice died out in the quaint refrain she had been accompanying.
She rose instinctively, which was more than Peggy did, having no reverence for age in her own sister--and Madame de Moidrey came forward and took the girl's slender hands in hers.
"Have you concluded to remain with me?" she asked, smilingly.
"I did not understand that you had asked me," said the girl gravely.
"I do ask you."
Philippa looked at Warner, then lifted her grey eyes to the elder woman.
"You are very kind, Madame. I--it will be a great happiness to me if you accept my services."
The Countess de Moidrey regarded her, still retaining her hands, still smiling.
"You have a very sweet way of making the acceptance mine and not yours," she said. "Let us accept each other, Philippa. Will you?"
"You are most kind, Madame----"
"Can kindness win you?"
"Madame, it has already."