Free The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West Page A

it doesn’t matter. They all know me here; Maman used to bring me here for treats when I was a tiny boy. They all adore me really. Come, darling, where is your friend?”
    She had contrived that violence should not make her life a tragedy. It might yet make her life a farce, which she would find hardly more tolerable. They went out on the terrace, Marc’s fingers opening and closing on her wrist, to the man who had brought this on her.

III
    ISABELLE HAD been right in her supposition that André de Verviers would be too alarmed by her vehement rejection of his roses to take any steps to interfere with her engagement. But she was wholly prevented from exulting in her success by the circumstance that the engagement thus preserved intact was not the one she had had in mind when she formed the plan. She was, however, too busy for melancholy to master her days as it did her nights, for without pause her unpremeditated marriage thrust unforeseen experiences on her. Very soon she was made aware that there was some truth in the rumour that a Jewish strain accounted for Marc’s close black curls and his rubber-ball vitality; for nothing else, she realized, could account for the emphasis which his family laid on the necessity for perfect Catholic orthodoxy in the conduct of the marriage, not only at the first meeting with her, but almost in the first moment of that meeting. Hardly had she been freed from the embrace of Madame Sallafranque, a small and smart woman whose gleaming Schiaparelli clips gave her the air of a competent vivandiere, when she was introduced to two priests, who were sitting back on the lambskin and aluminium sofa, with fingertips pressed to fingertips, looking self-consciously shrewd. They regarded her with an eye at once solemn, negotiating, and bland, as if she were a coffin that had presently to be carried down a winding staircase, and they could promise her that she would suffer no rude concussion during this progress, since they were neat-handed men of infinite experience in these matters. It appeared immediately that they were there to instruct her on the steps that would have to be taken for the nullification of her first marriage, in order that, as a good son of the Church, Marc should not err by marrying a woman who had divorced her husband. When Isabelle explained that she had lost Roy not by divorce but by death, they were at first incredulous, as if they had believed till then that natural widowhood was impossible in the United States, but on learning that he had been killed in an aeroplane they nodded and said several times, “ Ah, mais parfaitment, mais naturellement! ” and addressed themselves to the subject of her conversion. Isabelle felt obliged, though she knew she was offending against the social spirit of the occasion, to tell them that her family had never lapsed from the faith and that she had been baptized into the Church in infancy.
    It was as great a contretemps as she had feared. The priests showed the coldness natural in undertakers who had been summoned to a house where there was nobody even ill; and Madame Sallafranque overwhelmed them with profuse apologies that were at once domineering and abjectly mendicant. This was very different from the attitude to which Isabelle had become accustomed in her own home, where the priest took his place with the family doctor and solicitor as an expert in a defined sphere, whom prudent men consulted and obeyed when they were vexed by certain problems, and where he was treated, in consequence, with the unemotional respect due to one who fulfilled a useful function. Here, she saw, ecclesiastical approval was being snatched at as if it were a material object conferring a benefit, say a card of admission to a gala fête from which one would otherwise be excluded with some implication of contempt. But there was something not petty in the appeal; it might have been admission to a fortress that had been sought by those who had fared ill under the