VI

A COMMERCIAL TRAVELLER

Mam’selle Zilda Chaplot keeps the station hotel at St. Armand, in the French country.

The hotel is like a wooden barn with doors and windows, not a very large barn either.  The station is merely a platform of planks between the hotel and the rails.  The railroad is roughly made; it lies long and straight in a flat land, snow-clad in winter, very dusty in the summer sun, and its line is only softened by a long row of telegraph poles, which seem to waver and tremble as the eye follows their endless repetition into the distance.  In some curious way their repetition lends to the stark road a certain grace.

When Zilda Chaplot was young there were fewer wires on these telegraph poles, fewer railway-lines opposite the station, fewer houses in St. Armand, which lies half a mile away.  The hotel itself is the same, but in those days it was not painted yellow, as it is now, and was not half so well kept.  The world has progressed by twenty years since mam’selle was a girl, and, also, she owns the place herself now, and is a much better inn-keeper than was her father.

Mam’selle Chaplot is a very active person, tall, and somewhat stout.  Her complexion is brown; her eyes are very black; over them there is a fringe of iron-grey hair, which she does up in curl-papers every night, and which, in consequence, stands in very tight little curls all day.

Mam’selle Chaplot minds her affairs well; she has a keen eye to the main chance.  She is sometimes sharp, a trifle fiery, but on the whole she is good-natured.  There are lines about the contour of her chin, and also where the neck sweeps upward, which suggest a more than common power of satisfaction in certain things, such as dinners and good sound sleep, and good inn-keeping—­yes, and in spring flowers, and in autumn leaves and winter sunsets.  Zilda Chaplot was formed for pleasure, yet there is no tendency latent in her which could have made her a voluptuary.  There are some natures which have so nice a proportion of faculties that they are a law of moderation to themselves.  They take such keen delight in small pleasures that to them a little is enough.

The world would account Mam’selle Chaplot to have had a life of toil and stern limitations; a prosperous life, truly, for no one could see her without observing her prosperity, but still a hard dry life.  Even her neighbours, whose ideas of enjoyment do not soar above the St. Armand level, think that her lot would be softer if she married.  Many of the men have offered marriage, not with any disinterested motive, it is true, but with kindly intent.  They have been set aside like children who make requests unreasonable, but so natural for them to make that the request is hardly worth noticing.  The women relatives of these rejected suitors have boasted to mam’selle of their own domestic joys, and have drawn the contrast of her state in strong colour.  Zilda only says ‘Chut!’ or she lifts her chin a little, so that the pretty upward sweep of the neck is apparent, and lets them talk.  Mam’selle is not the woman to be turned out of her way by talk.