She was waiting for something. There was a restless, vagrant spirit
alive in her now. She had been so long inactive, tied by the leg,
with wings clipped; now her mind roamed into pleasant places of the
imagination where life had freedom, where she could renew the impulses
of youth. A true philosopher-a man of the world-would have known for
what she was waiting with that vague, disordered expectancy and yearning;
but there was no man of the world to watch and guide her this fateful
summer, when things began to go irretrievably wrong.
Then George Masson came. He was a man of the world in his way; he saw
and knew better than the philosopher of the Manor Cartier. He grasped
the situation with the mind of an artist in his own sphere, and with the
knowledge got by experience. Thus there had been the thing which the
Clerk of the Court saw from Mont Violet behind the Manor; and so it was
that as Jean Jacques helped Carmen down from the red wagon on their
return from Vilray, she gave him a smile which was meant to deceive; for
though given to him it was really given to another man in her mind's eye.
At sunset she gave it again to George Masson on the river-bank, only
warmer and brighter still, with eyes that were burning, with hands that
trembled, and with an agitated bosom more delicately ample than it was on
the day the Antoine was wrecked.
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