Mignon by James M. Cain

not occur every day.” And then, sad, sipping: “ La joueuse is vraiment demimondaine , half dame , half, hélas , madam. But, with you, I forget the one et become the other. So, ci après , if you please, attempt not to pay.”
    “Miss Tremaine, all I see is a lady.”
    “ Merci . But to you may I be Marie?”
    “I’d be honored to call you that.”
    “And how shall I call you?”
    “My name is William.”
    But she laughed and told me: “This I cannot say.” She tried to say it, and it came out a cross between veal and bouillon . She said: “I shall call you Guillaume .”
    “That’ll please me no end.”
    She rested her glass on one of my knees, dropped her head on the other, and let some time go by without talking. The ice in the bucket looked clean, and I crunched a piece in my teeth. I said: “That’s fine ice, Marie. Where’s it from, if you know?”
    “Minnesota. For two years it came from Canada, by sea, and was full of small creatures. But, depuis Vicksburg, the river boats can come down, and we get the lake ice once more.”
    “Where I come from the ice is no good.”
    “And where is this, Guillaume?”
    By then, sweet as she was, and gallant, giving help when she didn’t have to, I couldn’t have lied any more, and in fact already hated I’d had to give her a false name. I said: “Maryland—it’s tidewater, and whenever we cut ourselves ice, it’s always brackish with salt.”
    “May I be femme curieuse and ask what you do?”
    “Marie, I’m an engineer.”
    “Of railroads, oui ?”
    “No, hydraulic. My specialty is piles.”
    “Ah, les pieux! ”
    Now someone who drives piles kind of gets used to a smile when he says what his business is, and more or less smiles himself. But the way she took it, you’d have thought I sang in grand opera. She set her glass on the table, put her arms around me, and asked, very breathless: “You are associé with M’sieu Eads? You have been sent here by him?”
    “... Now how do you know about him?”
    “Oh I know—I am femme d ’ affaires in New Orleans, and we of affaires know. He revives the de Pauget plan.”
    “The—what?”
    “The plan of Adrien de Pauget, our great engineer, who wished long ago, perhaps one hundred years, to drive of pieux in the river, and compel it to cut its canal through the barrière to the Gulf. It should make of New Orleans a capitale , by opening her to big ships! It should open also Vicksburg, Memphis, et St. Louis—we shall have pays cosmopolitain! M’sieu Eads, so we hear, revives it, this de Pauget plan. You are of him, Guillaume?”
    “Marie, I have to confess I don’t know him—my father does, but I don’t. And I never heard of de Pauget. But the channel is what brought me here, when Mr. Eads gets around to it. If I can get my business started, here on the spot in New Orleans, I hope to bid on the work—to be part of something big.”
    “ Ah , oui . I could feel you were poète .”
    “Marie, I wouldn’t deceive you—I’m just a lad with a slide rule, a partner—kind of dumb but he does know tugboats—plenty of nerve, and one thing lacking.”
    “Money?”
    “How did you guess it?”
    “It may not be difficile! ”
    She kissed me once more, then jumped up and started checking over what we’d do with the girl. I got out the City Hotel key, the one to 301, gave it to her and said: “That room’s in my name, but she can come right up, and I’ll take another, in her name, and keep the key myself.” We agreed on Eloise Brisson as a good name for the girl, and I wrote it down on paper I found in my pocket. I said: “If she’ll come around seven, we can get the thing over quick, and she’ll have the rest of the night to herself.” Small details, we decided, could be settled with the girl. That seemed to be all, and Marie got my oilskin and hat, saying she’d see me out. In the lower hall, she stopped by the door across from the room I’d been in, opened it, and beckoned. My heart