the French were charming, charming, and Paris gave them just the background that they needed. It was a fine life.
Elinor took charge of everything. She took charge of the money, the making of plans, the driving of bargains with avaricious and shrewd-witted Frenchmen, and the ordering of food in restaurants.
“It’s really astonishing, you know,” said Starwick—“the way she walks in everywhere and has the whole place at her feet in four minutes…. Really, Gene, you should have been with us this afternoon when she made arrangements with the man at the motor agency in the Champs-Elysées for renting the car…. Really, I felt quite sorry for him before the thing was over…. He kept casting those knowing and rather bitter glances of reproach at me,” said Starwick, with his burble of soft laughter, “as if he thought I had betrayed him by not coming to his assistance…. There was something very cruel about it… like a great cat playing with a mouse… there really was, you know,” said Starwick earnestly. “She can be completely without pity when she gets that way,” he added. “She really can, you know… which makes it all the more astonishing—I mean, when you consider what she really is—the way she let me go to sleep on her shoulder the night we were coming back from Rheims, and I was so horribly drunk and got so disgustingly sick,” he said with a simple, touching earnestness. “I mean, the compassion of it—it was quite like that Chinese goddess of the Infinite Compassion they have in Boston—it really was, you know. It’s quite astonishing,” he said earnestly, “when you consider her background, the kind of people that she came from—it really is, you know… she’s a grand person, simply terrific… it’s utterly mad—Boston… it really is.”
Certainly it was very pleasant to be in the hands of such a captain. Elinor got things done with a beautiful, serene assurance that made everything seem easy. There was no difficulty of custom or language, no weird mystery and complication of traffic, trade, and commerce, so maddening and incomprehensible to most Americans, that Elinor did not understand perfectly. Sometimes she would just shake her head and bite her lip, smiling. Sometimes she would laugh with rich astonishment, and say: “Perfectly insane, of course—but then, that’s the way the poor dears are, and you can’t change them…. I know! I know!… It’s quite incredible, but they’ll always be that way, and we’ve simply got to make the best of it.”
She was a heavily
