Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams

She still mourned her husband, dead five years, and wore only black, but her effect was vivid. Her hair was bright gold and she wore it in a thick crowning braid across the waves that rose from her brow. Her eyes were very blue, capable of a great spectacle of innocence or charming guile, and she wore mascara heavily on her long lashes. She had dimples and perfect white teeth.
    We took tea from a beautiful table before the fire, and we talked about Antibes, where I had spent the summer. Mme. Frenaye poured a little rum from a pretty porcelain jug into the tea, and said, “I would not have thought of going to the Riviera in the summer. So crowded then. But of course you are so young, you have not been to France before.”
    She seemed prepared to forgive, and I did not want to protest that I had had a very good time.
    She went on, “But a winter in Paris, there you have chosen wisely, this time you will not regret your choice. Theatre, opera, it is all here for you, the best in the world. And of course the Sorbonne, since you have chosen to study.” She was vastly amused to learn that the name of my course at the Sorbonne was
Cours de la civilisation française.
“But you will spend the rest of your life—” she said, and I agreed.
    We talked, and drank our tea, and ate small delicious cakes, until it occurred to me that I had perhaps stayed too long and so rose to leave. I think I had really forgotten that I had come about a room, or perhaps such a crass consideration seemed inappropriate in Louis XVI surroundings. Instead, on the way out I admired a painting. Mme. Frenaye said, “Ah, yes, and it has a gross value.” I translate literally to give theprecise effect of her words on me. My French was not good, and I thought I had misheard her, or not known an idiom. I would not be warned.
    Then, at the door, while helping me with my still damp yellow coat, she said that she had heard that I needed a pleasant place to live, that she would be willing to let me live there, that she would serve me breakfast and dinner, and she named an outrageous number of francs. Even translated into dollars it was high. I was so stunned by her whole method that I accepted on the spot, and it was agreed that I would bring my things on the following Monday. That I did not even ask to see the room is evidence of my stupor; I must have thought it would be exactly like the salon.
    And sometimes now I wonder whether she had any idea that I would accept; or made up that ridiculous figure simply to let me off. And I wonder too if I did not want to prove that I could do better than yellow coats and summer dresses in a cold September rain; behind me there were sound American dollars, and, as my father would have said, more where they came from. So, from our combined dubious motives, we were joined, to live and eat and talk together throughout those difficult historic months from September until February, until our private war became visible and manifest, and I left.
    The room was actually not as bad as it might have been, taken on such dazzled faith. It was not large, nor warm, nor did it contain a desk or a bookcase; however, the bed was regally gilded and huge and soft, and I slept under comforting layers of down, between pink linen sheets. Madame sighed, her beautiful eyes misted as she showed the bed to me and I felt badly about so depriving her until I realized that her ownsmall bed-sitting room had been astutely chosen as the warmest room in the house. And the grand bed would not fit into it.
    When I said such things to Laura and Joe, later to Bruno, as we hunched over beers in the steamy Café de Flore or the Deux Magots, they reasonably exclaimed, “But why on earth do you stay there?” (Laura and Joe were Marxists, and I was acceptable to them partly because my arrangement with Mme. Frenaye left me with virtually no money at all.) In any case I did not think that they would feel the charm of Mme. Frenaye, and so I would say to them, “But