Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/55

himself. "Why shouldn't my daughter, my little Colette, have a real home?"

Finding no answer, Lepetit poured himself a second glass of wine. And still Monique didn't come.

Maybe she would not be coming at all. True enough, he had sent her a fat check the previous Friday. She wanted an automobile; well, let her have one. But to fool a man who knew what it was to carry on a vast business at home and abroad-that was too much.

His gaze, roving aimlessly around the room, again fell on the nude. "Can it really be true?" he thought. "Maybe at this very moment, on a red sofa, she is giving herself to some fool. Idiot that I am, waiting for my own wife to die so that I can make Monique my legal wife. And to think I have chosen a whore as Colette's mother!"

Thinking again of Colette his heart ached with longing. He quickly rose from the deep couch. Colette's name on this couch of sin! He clutched at his heart and sank down on a chair near the window. On the forked twigs of an orphaned bough, tiny buds were growing. When he was a boy he used to love to chew the hard little cusps between his sturdy teeth. When he was young he used to enjoy watching the women and girls at the water's edge. His father would scold him and sometimes beat him. "Where the devil did you disappear to?" he would say. The store would be crowded with customers, summer visitors from the city. They would come into the store, their arms and throats bare, to buy oranges. Lepetit had always had a preference for the blonde girls, with their rosy freckled faces, their pale and graceful throats, and their bashful glances. . . And that was the kind of girl he had imagined Monique to be. Of course he could not expect her to be virginal and intact; expect a naive young thing to take up with him, a man in his forties.