Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/144

window, the tremulous sound of fingers flying over piano keys, these were enough to make the blonde stenographer swoon with ecstasy. Airy nymphs born out of the foam of romantic waves, would swim through her imagination. Was it not Josephine playing for her Bonaparte? Or the eccentric Madame Tallien, or the delicate Madame Recamier ..?

There, behind drawn curtains, physical and spiritual beauty strode hand in hand. What wouldn't she give to reach that fabulous world! What a tragi-comedy life was, she thought bitterly. She had wanted since childhood the fairy world of esthetics and art, and it was her friend Renée who had run off with the prize. Renée, who had never been in an art gallery in her life, was now the wife of a sophisticated art dealer, and suddenly found herself in the center of the most select society. So refined was she, one could hardly recognize her as the Renée of old who pounded her typewriter side by side with Monique, and who gave up lunch so as to save enough money to buy a dress. Now she talked like an aristocrat to the manner born as though blue blood flowed through her veins.

"Yes," she thought. "If I'd only been a little firmer, instead of yielding to that idiotic fruit merchant, and worrying about the tears of my parents, I'd have gotten somewhere by now."

She drew her gloves on her slender fingers, then grasped the steering wheel. The decision was suddenly fixed in her brain. She would sweep away all obstacles; she would escape from the life that was suffocating her; she would go on to more spacious roads, roads which wandered through cultivated gardens where beauty and spirituality bloom on the same branch, where love and art walk hand in hand along the sun-kissed shores of Nice, Biarritz, and Monte Carlo.