There had been a certain amount of "young society"
too, and one or two incipient love-affairs, watched with
anxious interest by her father and with a harrowed
conscience by her mother, who knew Elfrida's capacity
for amusing herself; and unlimited opportunities had
occurred for the tacit exhibition of her superiority to
Sparta, of which she had not always taken advantage. But
the significance of the year gathered into the French
lessons; it was by virtue of these that the time had a
place in her memory. Mademoiselle Joubert supplemented
her instruction with a violent affection, a great deal
of her society, and the most entertainingly modern of
the French novels, which Brentano sent her monthly in
enticing packets, her single indulgence. So that after
the first confusion of a multitude of tongues in the
irrelevant Parisian key Elfrida found herself reasonably
fluent and fairly at ease. The illumined jargon of the
atelier staid with her naturally; she never forgot a word
or a phrase, and in two months she was babbling and
mocking with the rest.
She lived alone; she learned readily to do it on eighty
francs a month, and her appartement became charming in
three weeks. She divined what she should have there, and
she managed to get extraordinary bargains in mystery and
history out of the dealers in such things, so cracked
and so rusty, so moth-eaten and of such excellent color,
that the escape of the combined effect from _banalite_
was a marvel.
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