She laughed now.
It was absurd to make so much fuss.
She had little enough amusement in her life, and if he liked to give her a treat and was content merely to sit beside her and to talk, she would be a fool to forgo it.
After all, she was nothing. She need answer for her actions to nobody.
She could take care of herself and she had given him full warning.
“Oh, very well,” she said.
They went to the pictures several times and after the show Robert accompanied Lydia to whichever was the nearest station for her to get a train home.
During the little walk he took her arm and for a part of the performance he held her hand, once or twice when they parted he kissed her lightly on both cheeks, but these were the only familiarities he permitted himself.
He was good company.
He had a chaffing, ironic way of talking about things that pleased her.
He did not pretend to have read very much, he had no time, he said, and life was more entertaining than books, but he was not stupid and he could speak intelligently of such books as he had read.
It interested Lydia to discover that he had a peculiar admiration for Andre Gide.
He was an enthusiastic tennis-player and he told her that at one time he had been encouraged to take it seriously; people of importance in the game, thinking he had the making of a champion, had interested themselves in him.
But nothing came of it.
“One needs more money and more time to get into the first rank than I could dispose of,” he said.
Lydia had a notion that he was in love with her, but she would not allow herself to be certain of it, for she could not but fear that her own feelings made her no safe judge of his.
He occupied her thoughts more and more.
He was the first friend of her own age that she had ever had.
She owed him happy hours at the concerts he took her to on Sunday afternoons, and happy evenings at the cinema.
He gave her life an interest and excitement it had never had before.
For him she took pains to dress more prettily.
She had never been in the habit of making up, but on the fourth or fifth time she met him she rouged her cheeks a little and made up her eyes.
“What have you done to yourself?” he said, when they got into the light.
“Why have you been putting all that stuff on your face?”
She laughed and blushed under her rouge.
“I wanted to be a little more of a credit to you.
I couldn’t bear that people should think you were with a little kitchen-maid who’d just come up to Paris from her native province.”
“But almost the first thing I liked in you was that you were so natural.
One gets so tired of all these painted faces.
I don’t know why, I found it touching that you had nothing on your pale cheeks, nothing on your lips, nothing on your eyebrows.
It was refreshing, like a little wood that you come into after you’ve been walking in the glare of the road.
Having no make-up on gives you a look of candour and one feels it is a true expression of the uprightness of your soul.”
Her heart began to beat almost painfully, but it was that curious sort of pain which is more blissful than pleasure.
“Well, if you don’t like it, I’ll not do it again.
After all, I only did it for your sake.”
She looked with an inattentive mind at the picture he had brought her to see.
She had mistrusted the tenderness in his musical voice, the smiling softness of his eyes, but after this it was almost impossible not to believe that he loved her.
She had been exercising all the self-control she possessed to prevent herself from falling in love with him.
She had kept on saying to herself that it was only a passing fancy on his part and that it would be madness if she let her feelings run away with her.
She was determined not to become his mistress.
She had seen too much of that sort of thing among the Russians, the daughters of refugees who had so much difficulty in making any sort of a living; often enough, because they were bored, because they were sick of grinding poverty, they entered upon an affair, but it never lasted; they seemed to have no capacity for holding a man, at least not the Frenchmen whom they generally fell for; their lovers grew tired of them, or impatient, and chucked them; then they were even worse off than they had been before, and often nothing remained but the brothel.
But what else was there that she could hope for?
She knew very well he had no thought of marriage.
The possibility of such a thing would never have crossed his head.
She knew French ideas.
His mother would not consent to his marrying a Russian sewing-woman, which was all she was really, without a penny to bless herself with.
Marriage in France was a serious thing; the position of the respective families must be on a par and the bride had to bring a dowry conformable with the bridegroom’s situation.
It was true that her father had been a professor of some small distinction at the university, but in Russia, before the revolution, and since then Paris swarmed with princes and counts and guardsmen who were driving taxis or doing manual labour.
Everyone looked upon the Russians as shiftless and undependable.
People were sick of them.