Free From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant Page B

again. This time he said, “We are from a family of great …” It was lost. What now? Great innkeepers? Worriers? Skinflints? Whatever it was, old Mr. Cordier kept nodding to show he approved.
    “We don’t see nearly enough of young men like you,” he said.
    “True!” said Iris loudly. “We live in a dreary world of ill women down here.” Netta thought this hard on the American, on Mr. Cordier, and on the male Braunsweg twin, but none of them looked offended. “I’ve got no time for women,” said Iris. She slapped down a glass of whiskey so that it splashed, and rapped on a table with her knuckles. “Shall I tell you why? Because women don’t tick over. They just simply don’t tick over.” No one disputed this. Iris went on: Women were under-informed. One could have virile conversations only with men. Women were attached to the past through fear, whereas men had a fearless sense of history. “Men tick,” she said, glaring at Jack.
    “I am not attached to a past,” said Netta, slowly. “The past holds no attractions.” She was not used to general conversation. She thought that every word called for consideration and for an answer. “Nothing could be worse than the way we children were dressed. And our mothers – the hard waves of their hair, the white lips. I think of those pale profiles and I wonder if those women were ever young.”
    Poor Netta, who saw herself as profoundly English, spread consternation by being suddenly foreign and gassy. She talked the English of expatriate children, as if reading aloud. The twins looked shocked. But she had appealed to the American. He sat beside her on a scuffed velvet sofa. He was so large that she slid an inch or so in his direction when he sat down. He was Sandra Braunsweg’s special friend: they had been in London together. He was trying to write.
    “What do you mean?” said Netta. “Write what?”
    “Well – a novel, to start,” he said. His father had staked him to one year, then another. He mentioned all that Sandra had borne with, how she had actually kicked and punched himto keep him from being too American. He had embarrassed her to death in London by asking a waitress, “Miss, where’s the toilet?”
    Netta said, “Didn’t you mind being corrected?”
    “Oh, no. It was just friendly.”
    Jack meanwhile was listening to Sandra telling about her English forebears and her English education. “I had many years of undeniably excellent schooling,” she said. “Mitten Todd.”
    “What’s that?” said Jack.
    “It’s near Bristol. I met excellent girls from Italy, Spain. I took
him
there to visit,” she said, generously including the American. “I said, ‘Get a yellow necktie.’ He went straight out and bought one. I wore a little Schiaparelli. Bought in Geneva but still a real … A yellow jacket over a gray … Well, we arrived at my excellent old school, and even though the day was drizzly I said, ‘Put the top of the car back.’ He did so at once, and then he understood. The interior of the car harmonized perfectly with the yellow and gray.” The twins were orphaned. Iris was like a mother.
    “When Mummy died we didn’t know where to put all the Chippendale,” said Sandra, “Iris took a lot of it.”
    Netta thought, She is so silly. How can he respond? The girl’s dimples and freckles and soft little hands were nothing Netta could have ever described: she had never in her life thought a word like “pretty.” People were beautiful or they were not. Her happiness had always been great enough to allow for despair. She knew that some people thought Jack was happy and she was not.
    “And what made you marry your young cousin?” the old man boomed at Netta. Perhaps his background allowed him to ask impertinent questions; he must have been doing sonearly forever. He stroked his cat; he was confident. He was spokesman for a roomful of wondering people.
    “Jack was a moody child and I promised his mother I would look after