A feather
bed was a sign of social position; it was as much the dais to his honour
as is the woolsack to the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords.
She was waiting for something. There was a restless, vagrant spirit alive
in her now. She had been so long inactive, tied by the leg, with wings
clipped; now her mind roamed into pleasant places of the imagination
where life had freedom, where she could renew the impulses of youth. A
true philosopher-a man of the world-would have known for what she was
waiting with that vague, disordered expectancy and yearning; but there
was no man of the world to watch and guide her this fateful summer, when
things began to go irretrievably wrong.
Then George Masson came. He was a man of the world in his way; he saw and
knew better than the philosopher of the Manor Cartier. He grasped the
situation with the mind of an artist in his own sphere, and with the
knowledge got by experience. Thus there had been the thing which the
Clerk of the Court saw from Mont Violet behind the Manor; and so it was
that as Jean Jacques helped Carmen down from the red wagon on their
return from Vilray, she gave him a smile which was meant to deceive; for
though given to him it was really given to another man in her mind's eye.
At sunset she gave it again to George Masson on the river-bank, only
warmer and brighter still, with eyes that were burning, with hands that
trembled, and with an agitated bosom more delicately ample than it was on
the day the Antoine was wrecked.
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