* * * * *

A sick qualm of self-contempt shook Marise.  For, high and clear above everything else, there had come into her mind a quick discomfort at the contrast between her appearance and that of Eugenia.

CHAPTER XV

HOME LIFE

July 20.

The heat was appalling even early in the morning, right after breakfast.  There were always three or four such terrific days, even up here in the mountains, to remind you that you lived in America and had to take your part of the ferocious extremes of the American climate.

And of course this had to be the time when Toucle went off for one of her wandering disappearances.  Marise could tell that by the aspect of the old woman as she entered the kitchen that morning, her reticule bag bulging out with whatever mysterious provisions Toucle took with her.  You never missed anything from the kitchen.

Marise felt herself in such a nervously heightened state of sensitiveness to everything and everybody in those days, that it did not surprise her to find that for the first time she received something more than a quaint and amusing impression from the old aborigine.  She had never noticed it before, but sometimes there was something about Toucle’s strange, battered, leathery old face . . . what was it?  The idea came to her a new one, that Toucle was also a person, not merely a curious and enigmatic phenomenon.

Toucle was preparing to depart in the silent, unceremonious, absent-minded way she did everything, as though she were the only person in the world.  She opened the screen door, stepped out into the torrid glare of the sunshine and, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure, trudged down the path.

“Where does she go?” thought Marise, and “What was that expression on her face I could not name?”

Impulsively she went out quickly herself, and followed after the old woman.

“Toucle!  Toucle!” she called, and wondered if her voice in these days sounded to everyone as nervous and uncertain as it did to her.

The old woman turned and waited till the younger had overtaken her.  They were under the dense shade of an old maple, beside the road, as they stood looking at each other.

As she had followed, Marise regretted her impulse, and had wondered what in the world she could find to say, but now that she saw again the expression in the other’s face, she cried out longingly, “Toucle, where do you go that makes you look peaceful?”

The old woman glanced at her, a faint surprise appearing in her deeply lined face.  Then she looked at her, without surprise, seriously as though to see what she might read in the younger woman’s eyes.  She stood for a long moment, thinking.  Finally she sat down on the grass under the maple-tree, and motioned Marise to sit beside her.  She meditated for a long time, and then said, hesitatingly, “I don’t know as a white person could understand.  White people . . . nobody ever asked me before.”