women are not very moral—so many divorces in America."
"And still you went …!" breathed the nun, lost in admiration of the other's heroic, devotion, "when you ran the risk of meeting a divorced woman!"
The Marquise made another gentle, fatigued gesture of warding off praise. It was a practised gesture as though she had occasion to make' it often.
After a time she said, "Odd she should be so interested in the Cathedral here, and yet a free-thinker. What made her talk so much about the South Portal? I never heard of anything unusual about it, did you? Except that that disagreeable, anti-clerical fountain is somewhere near there, to the memory of those wicked revolutionists."
The nun shook her head, indifferently. "I always enter by the North Portal," she said. "I don't believe I ever happened to see the south one."
After reflection, the marquise said, "I don't believe I ever saw it either. Why should any one? You never enter from that side. Nobody lives on the rue d'Espagne, that anybody would ever have occasion to visit."
III
Anna Etchergary measured accurately the social status of the two ladies who asked for Madame Allen's apartment, and without getting up, or stopping her sewing, she answered in the careless tone suitable for people who wore home-made hats and cotton gloves, that Madame Allen was at the top of the first flight. After they had passed, she thought to herself that she believed she knew them. Mlle. Hasparren, the school-teacher and her married sister. They were Basques, like Anna, but of the small government employee class, who put on airs of gentility, and wore hats and leather shoes. Mlle. Hasparren gave music lessons, as well as teaching school. Probably she had come to try to be taken on as Marise's music-teacher.
