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It is a way that women and wives have, and they never see the bathos of it. The place filled gradually. The customary crowds gathered. The business of the day began underneath the multitudinous tones of the chiming bells. Bébée's business began too; she put the box behind her with a beating heart, and tied up her flowers.
Bebee's morning calls are never of shorter duration. He knows, as well as any one, that visits of politeness should be brief; but he is on such familiar terms with all his friends, that he can waive all ceremony and he generally does so, making himself "at home," as he says, wherever he goes. One day Mr. Jonas Bebee recollected that he had not called upon a certain Mrs.
But what affinity have I. Bébée, to your thoughts of your God walking in His cornfields?" Bébée's eyes glanced down through the green aisle of the forests, with the musing seriousness in them that was like the child-angels of Botticelli's dreams. "I cannot tell you very well. But when I am in the fields at evening and think of Christ.
Just so every morning, when she bathed her hands in the chilly water, she thought to herself, "I will make my skin as soft as I can for him, that it may be like the ladies' he has loved." Love to be perfect must be a religion, as well as a passion. Bébée's was so. Like George Herbert's serving-maiden, she swept no specks of dirt away from a floor without doing it to the service of her lord.
He has not even a distant suspicion of the real truth, that his visit was considered an almost unendurable infliction. Mr. Bebee's morning calls are often more unwelcome. He walks in, as a matter of course, takes his seat in the parlor, and sends up his name by the servant.
Leaning against the little lattice and looking down on her with musing eyes, half smiling, half serious, half amorous, half sad, Bébée looked up with a sudden and delicious terror that ran through her as the charm of the snake's gaze runs through the bewildered bird. "Would you cease to wish it if it were not good?" he asked again. Bébée's face grew pale and troubled.
He who had painted Phryne so long and faithfully had got a taint on his brush he could not paint this pure, bright, rosy dawn he who had always painted the glare of midnight gas on rouge or rags. Yet he felt that if he could transfer to canvas the light that was on Bébée's face he would get what Scheffer had missed. For a time it eluded him.
He, too, was very old; a lifelong neighbor and gossip of Antoine's; he had been a day laborer in these same fields all his years, and had never travelled farther than where the red mill-sails turned among the colza and the corn. "Come in, my pretty one, for a second," he whispered, with an air of mystery that made Bébée's heart quicken with expectancy. "Come in; I have something for you.
And then she would reproach herself with treason to him and ingratitude, and hate herself and feel guilty in her own sight to have thus sinned against him in thought for one single instant. For there are natures in which the generosity of love is so strong that it feels its own just pain to be disloyalty; and Bébée's was one of them.
The tears swam in Bébée's eyes as she saw the box whirled through the air. She had done right; she was sure she had done right. He was a stranger, and she could never have repaid him; but he made her feel herself wayward and ungrateful, and it was hard to see the beautiful fairy gift borne away forever by the chuckling, hobbling, greedy old baker's woman.
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