tion>
Annie Vivanti
The Outrage
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4064066186838
Table of Contents
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
Chérie was ready first. She flung her striped bath-robe over her shoulders and picked up Amour who was wriggling and barking at her pink heels.
"Au revoir dans l'eau," she said to little Mireille and to the German nursery governess, Frieda.
"Oh, Frieda, vite, vite, dégrafez-moi," cried Mireille, backing towards the hard-faced young woman and indicating a jumble of knotted tapes hanging down behind her.
"Speak English, please, both. This is our English day," said Frieda, standing in her petticoat-bodice in front of the mirror and removing what the girls called her "Wurst" from the top of her head. In the glass she caught sight of Chérie making for the door and called her back sharply. "Mademoiselle Chérie, you go not in the street without your stockings and your hat."
"Nonsense, Frieda! In Westende every one goes to bathe like this," and Chérie waved a bare shapely limb and flicked her pink toes at Amour, who barked wildly at them.
"I do not care how every one goes. You go not," said Frieda Rothenstein, hanging her sleek brown Wurst carefully on the mirror-stand.
"Then what have we come here for?" sulked Chérie, dropping Amour and giving him a soft kick with her bare foot.
"We have come here," quoth Frieda, "not for marching our undressed legs about the streets, but for the enjoyment both of the summer-freshness and of the out-view." Whereupon Mireille gave a sudden shriek of laughter and Amour bounded round her and barked.
Chérie crossed the room to the chair on which her walking clothes had been hastily flung. "Won't sand-shoes do?"
"No. Sand-shoes and stockings," said Frieda. "And hat," she added, glancing down at the comely bent head with its cascade of waving red-brown locks.
Chérie hurriedly drew on her black stockings, glancing up occasionally to smile at Mireille; and nothing could be sweeter than those shining eyes seen through the veil of falling hair. Now she was ready, her flapping bergère hat crushed down on her careless curls, Amour hoisted under her arm again, and with a nod of commiseration to Mireille she ran down the narrow wooden staircase of Villa Esther, Madame Guillaume's appartements meublés and was down in the rue des Moulins with her smiling face to the sea.
The street was a short one, half of it not yet built over, leading from a new aeroplane-shed at the back to the wide asphalted promenade