"THE FORCE ISN'T A NURSERY"
229
that was Grange's Andree glowing in her young wild beauty.
Moosta was in the back passage with her arms full of babies when Dick presented it to her; holding it away from chubby fingers and reaching mouths and finally taking it into the back parlour and pinning it on the wall between a garish oleograph of the Madonna and a little guttering lamp on the bracket below. Moosta demurred, being a devout Roman Catholic just now, with five children going to the Mission School. But Dick went away and left it there, smiling in its rounded contours and deep warm colours below the stiff, flat-faced Madonna.
Andree snatched the lamp up when she saw it, and looked at it long and very close. Then she whipped round on Moosta with parted lips that drew quick breaths, and eyes that made the lamplight pale.
"Dieu!" she cried. "That—that not me!"
Moosta looked up with her mouth full of silk threads. She was embroidering a mooseskin moccasin-front with exquisite neatness.
"Tanse?" she said. "Aha. C'est vous." And then she dropped her work. "Eh!" she cried. "He is ver' bon, cet pickshure, mais vous êtes mechatwow plus bonne."
Andree's colour ran up the smooth, glowing skin to the dark curls that made blue shadows about her temples. She turned to the painting again.
"He do that!" she said, quick and low. "Ah—c'est vrai. He made me like so!"
She had often seen herself as the distoted common mirrors of the houses she knew showed her to her own girl's eyes. She had not before seen herself as a man saw her, and that man the man of all others who had piqued her by his careless indifference, and roused her hate by his strength, and her interest by the stories men told of him. This was a triumph, a dizzy burning triumph; an unbelievable surprise. She pulled the painting down; breathing into it; sending the light of her eyes to meet those painted ones; the laugh on her lips to those red lips curved by a cunning hand. For the first time in the bald, raw life she had lived she saw absolute human beauty; vital, wonder-