II

“Where do you live?” asked Paulette, “when you’re not here at school?”

Angela blushed as she told her.

“In a hotel? In Union Square? Child, are you a millionaire? Where did you come from? Don’t you care anything about the delights of home? Mr. Cross, come closer. Here is this poor child living benightedly in a hotel when she might have two rooms at least in the Village for almost the same price.”

Mr. Cross came closer but without saying anything. He was really, Angela thought, a very serious, almost sad young man. He had never continued long the bantering line with which he had first made her acquaintance.

She explained that she had not known where to go. “Often I’ve thought of moving, and of course I’m spending too much money for what I get out of it⁠—I’ve the littlest room.”

Paulette opened her eyes very wide which gave an onlooker the effect of seeing suddenly the blue sky very close at hand. Her cheeks took on a flaming tint. She was really a beautiful, even fascinating girl⁠—or woman⁠—Angela never learned which, for she never knew her age. But her fascination did not rest on her looks, or at least it did not arise from that source; it was more the result of her manner. She was so alive, so intense, so interested, if she were interested, that all her nerves, her emotions even were enlisted to accomplish the end which she might have in view. And withal she possessed the simplicity of a child. There was an unsuspected strength about her also that was oddly at variance with the rather striking fragility of her appearance, the trustingness of her gaze, the limpid unaffectedness of her manner. Mr. Cross, Angela thought negligently, must be in love with her; he was usually at her side when they sketched. But later she came to see that there was nothing at all between these two except a certain friendly appreciation tempered by a wary kindness on the part of Mr. Cross and a negligent generosity on the part of Paulette.

She displayed no negligence of generosity in her desire and eagerness to find Angela a suitable apartment. She did hold out, however, with amazing frankness for one “not too near me but also not too far away.” But this pleased the girl, for she had been afraid that Paulette would insist on offering to share her own apartment and she would not have known how to refuse. She had the complete egoist’s desire for solitude.

Paulette lived on Bank Street; she found for her new friend “a duck⁠—just a duck⁠—no other word will describe it⁠—of an apartment” on Jayne Street, two rooms, bath and kitchenette. There was also a tiny balcony giving on a mews. It was more than Angela should have afforded, but the ease with which her affairs were working out gave her an assurance, almost an arrogance of confidence. Besides she planned to save by getting her own meals. The place was already furnished, its former occupant was preparing to go to London for two or more years.

“Two years,” Angela said gaily, “everything in the world can happen to me in that time. Oh I wonder what will have happened; what I will be like!” And she prepared to move in her slender store of possessions. Anthony, prompted, she suspected by Paulette, offered rather shyly to help her. It was a rainy day, there were several boxes after all, and taxis were scarce, though finally he captured one for her and came riding back in triumph with the driver. Afterwards a few books had to be arranged, pictures must be hung. She had an inspiration.

“You tend to all this and I’ll get you the best dinner you ever tasted in your life.” Memories of Monday night dinners on Opal Street flooded her memory. She served homely, filling dishes, “fit for a drayman,” she teased him. There were corn-beef hash, roasted sweet potatoes, corn pudding, and, regardless of the hour, muffins. After supper she refused to let him help her with the dishes but had him rest in the big chair in the living-room while she laughed and talked with him from the kitchenette at a distance of two yards. Gradually, as he sat there smoking, the sadness and strain faded out of his thin, dark face, he laughed and jested like any other normal young man. When he bade her goodbye he let his slow dark gaze rest in hers for a long silent moment. She closed the door and stood laughing, arranging her hair before the mirror.

“Of course he’s loads better looking, but something about him makes me think of Matthew Henson. But nothing doing, young-fellow-me-lad. Spanish and I suppose terribly proud. I wonder what he’d say if he really knew?”

She was to go to Paulette’s to dinner. “Just we two,” stipulated Miss Lister. “Of course, I could have a gang of men, but I think it will be fun for us to get acquainted.” Angela was pleased; she was very fond of Paulette, she liked for her generous, capable self. And she was not quite ready for meeting men. She must know something more about these people with whom she was spending her life. Anthony Cross had been affable enough, but she was not sure that he, with his curious sadness, his half-proud, half-sensitive tendency to withdrawal, were a fair enough type. However, in spite of Paulette’s protestations, there were three young men standing in her large, dark living-room when Angela arrived.

“But you’ve got to go at once,” said Paulette, laughing but firm; “here is my friend⁠—isn’t she beautiful? We’ve too many things to discuss without being bothered by you.”

“Paulette has these fits of cruelty,” said one of the three, a short, stocky fellow with an ugly, sensitive face. “She’d have made a good Nero. But anyway I’m glad I stayed long enough to see you. Don’t let her hide you from us altogether.” Another man made a civil remark; the third one standing back in the gloomy room said nothing, but the girl caught the impression of tallness and blondness and of a pair of blue eyes which stared at her intently. She felt awkward and showed it.

“See, you’ve made her shy,” said Paulette accusingly. “I won’t bother introducing them, Angèle, you’ll meet them all too soon.” Laughing, protesting, the men filed out, and their unwilling hostess closed the door on them with sincere lack of regret. “Men,” she mused candidly. “Of course we can’t get along without them any more than they can without us, but I get tired of them⁠—they’re nearly all animals. I’d rather have a good woman friend any day.” She sighed with genuine sincerity. “Yet my place is always full of men. Would you rather have your chops rare or well done? I like mine cooked to a cinder.” Angela preferred hers well done. “Stay here and look around; see if I have anything to amuse you.” Catching up an apron she vanished into some smaller and darker retreat which she called her kitchen.

The apartment consisted of the whole floor of a house on Bank Street, dark and constantly within the sound of the opening front door and the noises of the street. “But you don’t have the damned stairs when you come in late at night,” Paulette explained. The front room was, Angela supposed, the bedroom, though the only reason for this supposition was the appearance of a dressing-table and a wide, flat divan about one foot and a half from the floor, covered with black or purple velvet. The dressing table was a good piece of mahogany, but the chairs were indifferently of the kitchen variety and of the sort which, magazines affirm, may be made out of a large packing box. In the living room, where the little table was set, the same anomaly prevailed; the china was fine, even dainty, but the glasses were thick and the plating had begun to wear off the silver ware. On the other hand the pictures were unusual, none of the stereotyped things; instead Angela remarked a good copy of Breughel’s Peasant Wedding, the head of Bernini and two etchings whose authors she did not know. The bookcase held two paper bound volumes of the poems of Béranger and Villon and a little black worn copy of Heine. But the other books were highbrow to the point of austerity: Ely, Shaw and Strindberg.

“Perhaps you’d like to wash your hands?” called Paulette. “There’s a bathroom down the corridor there, you can’t miss it. You may have some of my favourite lotion if you want it⁠—up there on the shelf.” Angela washed her hands and looked up for the lotion. Her eyes opened wide in amazement. Beside the bottle stood a man’s shaving mug and brush and a case of razors.

The meal, “for you can’t call it a dinner,” the cook remarked candidly, was a success. The chops were tender though smoky; there were spinach, potatoes, tomato and lettuce salad, rolls, coffee and cheese. Its rugged quality surprised Angela not a little; it was more a meal for a working man than for a woman, above all, a woman of the faery quality of Paulette. “I get so tired,” she said, lifting a huge mouthful, “if I don’t eat heartily; besides it ruins my temper to go hungry.” Her whole attitude toward the meal was so masculine and her appearance so daintily feminine that Angela burst out laughing, explaining with much amusement the cause of her merriment. “I hope you don’t mind,” she ended, “for of course you are conspicuously feminine. There’s nothing of the man about you.”

To her surprise Paulette resented this last statement. “There is a great deal of the man about me. I’ve learned that a woman is a fool who lets her femininity stand in the way of what she wants. I’ve made a philosophy of it. I see what I want; I use my wiles as a woman to get it, and I employ the qualities of men, tenacity and ruthlessness, to keep it. And when I’m through with it, I throw it away just as they do. Consequently I have no regrets and no encumbrances.”

A packet of cigarettes lay open on the table and she motioned to her friend to have one. Angela refused, and sat watching her inhale in deep respirations; she had never seen a woman more completely at ease, more assuredly mistress of herself and of her fate. When they had begun eating Paulette had poured out two cocktails, tossing hers off immediately and finishing Angela’s, too, when the latter, finding it too much like machine oil for her taste, had set it down scarcely diminished. “You’ll get used to them if you go about with these men. You’ll be drinking along with the rest of us.”

She had practically no curiosity and on the other hand no reticences. And she had met with every conceivable experience, had visited France, Germany and Sweden; she was now contemplating a trip to Italy and might go to Russia; she would go now, in fact, if it were not that a friend of hers, Jack Hudson, was about to go there, too, and as she was on the verge of having an affair with him she thought she’d better wait. She didn’t relish the prospect of such an event in a foreign land, it put you too much at the man’s mercy. An affair, if you were going to have one, was much better conducted on your own pied à terre.

“An affair?” gasped Angela.

“Yes⁠—why, haven’t you ever had a lover?”

“A lover?”

“Goodness me, are you a poll parrot? Why yes, a lover. I’ve had”⁠—she hesitated before the other’s complete amazement⁠—“I’ve had more than one, I can tell you.”

“And you’ve no intention of marrying?”

“Oh I don’t say that; but what’s the use of tying yourself up now while you’re young? And then, too, this way you don’t always have them around your feet; you can always leave them or they’ll leave you. But it’s better for you to leave them first. It insures your pride.” With her babyish face and her sweet, high voice she was like a child babbling precociously. Yet she seemed bathed in intensity. But later she began to talk of her books and of her pictures, of her work and on all these subjects she spoke with the same subdued excitement; her eyes flashed, her cheeks grew scarlet, all experience meant life to her in various manifestations. She had been on a newspaper, one of the New York dailies; she had done press-agenting. At present she was illustrating for a fashion magazine. There was no end to her versatilities.

Angela said she must go.

“But you’ll come again soon, won’t you, Angèle?”

A wistfulness crept into her voice. “I do so want a woman friend. When a woman really is your friend she’s so dependable and she’s not expecting anything in return.” She saw her guest to the door. “We could have some wonderful times. Goodnight, Angèle.” Like a child she lifted her face to be kissed.

Angela’s first thought as she walked down the dark street was for the unfamiliar name by which Paulette had called her. For though she had signed herself very often as Angèle, no one as yet used it. Her old familiar formula came to her: “I wonder what she would think if she knew.” But of one thing she was sure: if Paulette had been in her place she would have acted in exactly the same way. “She would have seen what she wanted and would have taken it,” she murmured and fell to thinking of the various confidences which Paulette had bestowed upon her⁠—though so frank and unreserved were her remarks that “confidences” was hardly the name to apply to them. Certainly, Angela thought, she was in a new world and with new people. Beyond question some of the coloured people of her acquaintance must have lived in a manner which would not bear inspection, but she could not think of one who would thus have discussed it calmly with either friend or stranger. Wondering what it would be like to conduct oneself absolutely according to one’s own laws, she turned into the dark little vestibule on Jayne Street. As usual the Jewish girl who lived above her was standing blurred in the thick blackness of the hall, and as usual Angela did not realize this until, touching the button and turning on the light, she caught sight of Miss Salting straining her face upwards to receive her lover’s kiss.