"When you have made your fortune, Suzette, what will you do with it?"
"I shall buy that farm for my mother--I shall put Georgine into a
convent for the nobility, and arrange a large dot for her--and for
me?--I shall gamble in a controlled way at Monte Carlo--."
"You won't marry then, Suzette?"
"Marry!" she laughed a shrill laugh--"For why, Nicholas?--A tie-up to
one man, hein?--to what good?--and yet who can say--to be an honored
wife is the one experience I do not know yet!"--she laughed again--.
"And who is Georgine--you have not spoken of her before, Suzette?"
She reddened a little under her new terra cotta rouge.
"No?--Oh! Georgine is my little first mistake--but I have her
beautifully brought up, Nicholas--with the Holy Mother at St. Brieux. I
am then her Aunt--so to speak--the wife of a small shop keeper in
Paris, you must know--She adores me--and I give all I can to St.
Georges-des-Près--. Georgine will be a lady and marry the Mayor's
son--one day--."
Something touched me infinitely. This queer little demi-mondaine
mother--her thoughts set on her child's purity, and the conventional
marriage for her--in the future. Her plebeian, insolent little round
face so kindly in repose.
I respect Suzette far more than my friends of the world--.
When she left--it was perhaps in bad taste, but I gave her a quite heavy
four figure cheque.
"For the education of Georgine--Suzette."
She flung her arms round my neck and kissed me frankly on both cheeks,
and tears were brimming over in her merry black eyes.
"Thou hast after all a heart, and art after all a gentleman,
Nicholas--Va!--"--and she ran from the room.