The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West

struggling with their University courses. I lodged with her the two years I was at the Sorbonne.” He broke his bread and angrily swallowed a crumb or two. “I don’t know why, we all got very fond of her. She’s a stupid old woman, really, but she’s got an absurd bronze wig, and she quotes La Fontaine, and if anyone got sick or homesick she was extraordinarily kind. We all go up and see her quite often when we happen to be in Paris. I went up and called on her this morning. Waiter, waiter, where’s that dry Martini?”
    “Coming, coming, Monsieur.”
    “Why, you’ve just ordered it,” Isabelle chided him. He was really very nervous. For the last few minutes he had been talking of Madame Dupont-Gaillard as if he were reproachfully confronting her with an exemplar, though she felt she could hardly be blamed for not wearing a bronze wig, or not quoting La Fontaine, and she knew that he was in no position to judge how she behaved to the sick and the homesick. “Well, what’s the matter?”
    His gaze, that had been fever-bright, went leaden. “Oh, nothing,” he said courteously. “But that’s where I was, and I’m sorry I was late and kept you waiting. Nothing’s the matter, really …” His voice trailed away, he became still paler, he raked the terrace with his leaden gaze, and suddenly galvanized himself into a show of exclaiming interest. “Why, surely that’s Michael Baker over there.”
    “So it is,” said Isabelle.
    “And that’s his new wife, that used to be Claudia Greenway Green, of Nashville, Tennessee.” He stood up and looked across the terrace at his friends with an expression oddly fatigued and calculating; and then he looked down at Isabelle’s uplifted face. “Shall I ask them to come over and have lunch with us?” he said, very slowly, as if he wanted to show that he understood fully all the implications of what he was saying.
    She smiled. At least she could do this sort of thing quite well. Her smile was probably quite convincing. “Why not?”
    “Yes,” he agreed, “why not?” He held her eyes with his, he would not let them go. “We had nothing we wanted to talk about alone, had we?”
    She shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
    He bowed gravely and turned his back on her to go to his friends. The tears rushed into her eyes; his tall stiff back, the white cloths on the tables, the striped black and yellow awning, the gay blue dress of a woman lunching happily with her lover, and the green hedge ran into shining confusion like molten glass. She remembered the infamies she had heard of that men practised on the dignity of women, and with a shout of surprise from her nerves realized for the first time that they might be practised on her. A story came back to her which she had been told by an indignant Frenchwoman, a young widow, whom she had met on board ship during her last voyage. This girl had been a vendeuse with a great French couturier, who had lent her for six months to a Fifth Avenue store; and while she was there she had excited the admiration of a Jewish broker, who whirling her round in night clubs, holding her hand at the Opera, had told her that he was just crazy about her, and could hardly wait to take her down to City Hall. He was repulsively fat and ugly, but he was kind, and she longed for a home and children; so one night she had told him that she was willing to go down with him to City Hall any morning that he chose. At that his jaw had dropped, and he had stammered that he hadn’t thought she was a girl to misunderstand a fellow that was just giving her a rush and take it that he was playing the heavy lover. The girl’s pride had been broken, and at some loss she had thrown up her post, terrified of staying longer in a country where the code of manners did not preserve the decencies between the sexes. Isabelle had listened to her story sympathetically, but had privately felt that the girl must have been guilty of some indiscretion, even of