“What do you say to Nice to-morrow, dearest?”
the Princess suggested a few evenings later as she
followed Undine upstairs after a languid evening at
bridge with the Duchess and Madame de Trezac.
Half-way down the passage she stopped to open a door
and, putting her finger to her lip, signed to Undine
to enter. In the taper-lit dimness stood two
small white beds, each surmounted by a crucifix and
a palm branch, and each containing a small brown sleeping
child with a mop of hair and a curiously finished
little face. As the Princess stood gazing on
their innocent slumbers she seemed for a moment like
a third little girl scarcely bigger and browner than
the others; and the smile with which she watched them
was as clear as theirs. “Ah, si seulement
je pouvais choisir leurs amants!” she sighed
as she turned away.
“—Nice to-morrow,” she repeated,
as she and Undine walked on to their rooms with linked
arms. “We may as well make hay while the
Trezac shines. She bores Mamma frightfully, but
Mamma won’t admit it because they belong to
the same oeuvres. Shall it be the eleven train,
dear? We can lunch at the Royal and look in the
shops—we may meet somebody amusing.
Anyhow, it’s better than staying here!”
Undine was sure the trip to Nice would be delightful.
Their previous expeditions had shown her the Princess’s
faculty for organizing such adventures. At Monte-Carlo,
a few days before, they had run across two or three
amusing but unassorted people, and the Princess, having
fused them in a jolly lunch, had followed it up by
a bout at baccarat, and, finally hunting down an eminent
composer who had just arrived to rehearse a new production,
had insisted on his asking the party to tea, and treating
them to fragments of his opera.
A few days earlier, Undine’s hope of renewing
such pleasures would have been clouded by the dread
of leaving Madame de Trezac alone with the Duchess.
But she had no longer any fear of Madame de Trezac.
She had discovered that her old rival of Potash Springs
was in actual dread of her disfavour, and nervously
anxious to conciliate her, and the discovery gave
her such a sense of the heights she had scaled, and
the security of her footing, that all her troubled
past began to seem like the result of some providential
“design,” and vague impulses of piety
stirred in her as she and the Princess whirled toward
Nice through the blue and gold glitter of the morning.
They wandered about the lively streets, they gazed
into the beguiling shops, the Princess tried on hats
and Undine bought them, and they lunched at the Royal
on all sorts of succulent dishes prepared under the
head-waiter’s special supervision. But as
they were savouring their “double” coffee
and liqueurs, and Undine was wondering what her companion
would devise for the afternoon, the Princess clapped
her hands together and cried out: “Dearest,
I’d forgotten! I must desert you.”
