Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/11

you know is how to thump the cushions; apart from that you're all thumbs!" she scolded.

Whenever she was seized with one of these hysterical outbursts, she would pick at Monsieur Blank. He was made responsible for everything; for bringing her nothing but shame and disgrace. How could he stand there and make it necessary for her to quarrel with the servants, she the former mannequin from Chez Patou? She squandered his money and made him feel at the same time that he was a miserable miser, caring for nothing but her queenly embraces. All the things he had promised her!-and when it came right down to it he wouldn't even provide a decent housekeeper.

In her excitement her straw-blond hair would slip from its net and tumble down like flax over her slim bare shoulders. A tear, blackened by the makeup on her eyelids, would course down her cheek, creating havoc on her heavily powdered face. Yet she wasn't always ill-tempered. Sometimes she would give Anna a free hour during the day, or correct her speech and teach her to read and write.

So two years passed, bringing with them new experiences to a girl whose youth had been cut in two, like a delicate branch struck by lightning. An alien soil-but the sun, warm as a benediction in the sky, healed her torn arteries with its tenderness. Two years of slow growth, of transplantation, of forgetting the old and adjusting one's self to the new. The two years saw many tears dried, many longings pushed down into the hidden corridors of her soul, but never extinguished, like flickering lights guarding her dead thoughts in the dark catacombs of her being.

Now she became a qualified sewing machine operator, the holder of a labor card, living by herself in a hotel room. And, like all the other girls, she had a friend, Yaska by name, a