The Southern Woman by Elizabeth Spencer

Author:Elizabeth Spencer [Spencer, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60481-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

I held out for Jamie and Monte Carlo. He wasn’t an intellectual like Ben and Eric. He would listen while they finished up a bottle of wine and then would start looking around the restaurant. “That lady didn’t have anything but snails and bread,” he would say, or, of a couple leaving, “He didn’t even know that girl when they came in.” He was just being a small-town boy. But with Mayfred he must have been different; she laughed so much. “What do they talk about?” Ben asked me, perplexed. “Ask them,” I advised. “You think they’d tell me?” “I doubt it,” I said. “They wouldn’t know what to say,” I added. “They would just tell you the last things they said.” “You mean like, why do they call it the Seine if they don’t seine for fish in it? Real funny.”

Jamie got worried about Mayfred in Paris because the son of the hotel owner, a young Frenchman so charming he looked like somebody had made him up whole cloth, wanted to take her out. She finally consented with some trepidation on our part, especially from Ben, who in this case posed as her uncle, with strict orders from her father. The Frenchman, named Paul something, was not disturbed in the least: Ben fitted right in with his ideas of how things ought to be. So Mayfred went out with him, looking, except for her sunny hair, more French than the natives—we all had to admit being proud of her. I, also, had invitations, but none so elegant. “What happened?” we all asked, the next day. “Nothing,” she insisted. “We just went to this little nightclub place near some school … begins with an ‘S.’ ” “The Sorbonne,” said Ben, whose bemusement, at that moment, peaked. “Then what?” Eric asked. “Well, nothing. You just eat something, then talk and have some wine and get up and dance. They dance different. Like this.” She locked her hands together in air. “He thought he couldn’t talk good enough for me in English, but it was OK.” Paul sent her some marrons glacés, which she opened on the train south, and Jamie munched one with happy jaws. Paul had not suited him. It was soon after that, he and Mayfred began their pairing off. In Jamie’s mind we were moving on to Monte Carlo, and had been ever since London. The first thing he did was find out how to get to the Casino.

He got dressed for dinner better than he had since the Savoy. Mayfred seemed to know a lot about the gambling places, but her attitude was different from his. Jamie was bird-dogging toward the moment; she was just curious. “I’ve got to trail along,” Eric said after dinner, “just to see the show.” “Not only that,” said Ben, “we might have to stop him in case he gets too carried away. We might have to bail him out.” When we three, following up the rear (this was Jamie’s night), entered

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