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"I can see it's going to be particularly hard on you from now on," he said.

"I don't care."

"She doesn't deserve you," he said softly, and leaned toward me to kiss me good-bye. Just at that moment, we heard Daphne's footsteps clicking up the corridor. She marched out of the shadows firmly, but some of the darkness still hovered around her furious eyes. She paused a few feet away from us, her arms folded under her bosom, and glared.

"I want to see you this instant, Ruby," she said. "Beau, I'd like you to leave."

"Leave?"

"This instant," she said, her voice cracking like a bullwhip.

"Is there something wrong?" he asked softly.

"I'll discuss that with your parents," she said. He looked at me and then walked out quickly to join his waiting buddies.

"What's wrong?" I asked Daphne.

"Follow me," she ordered. She pivoted and marched back down the hallway. I tagged along, my heart thumping with anticipation. She paused at the doorway of my studio and turned to me.

"If Beau hadn't deserted Gisselle for you, she would never have been in that car with Martin," she declared. Why did he leave a sophisticated young Creole girl for an unschooled Cajun so quickly, I've wondered. It came to me last night," she said. "Like divine inspiration. And sure enough, my heartfelt suspicions proved true." She threw the studio door open. "Inside."

"Why?" I asked, but did what she demanded. She stared furiously at me a moment and then followed me in and walked directly to my easel. There she threw back some of my current drawings until she came to the drawing I had done of Beau nude. I gasped.

"This is too good to come just from your sinful Imagination," she declared. "Isn't it? Don't lie," she added quickly. I took a deep breath.

"I've never lied to you, Daphne," I said. "And I won't lie to you now."

"He posed?"

"Yes," I confessed. She nodded. "But--"

"Get out and don't dare set foot in this studio again. The door will be locked forever, as far as I'm concerned. Go," she commanded, her arm extended, finger pointing.

I turned and hurried away. Who was the true invalid in this house, I wondered, Gisselle or me?

20

Bird in a Gilded Cage

.

Ever since the dreadful car accident, Daddy had

been moping about like a man who had lost his desire to live. His shoulders drooped, his face was

shadowed, his eyes dull. He ate poorly, grew paler and paler, and even took less care with his

appearance. And he spent more and more time alone in Uncle Jean's room.

Daphne's tone was always critical and harsh. Instead of showing him compassion and

understanding, she complained about her own new problems and insisted that he was only making things more difficult for her. Never did she first consider him and how he was suffering.

So it came as no surprise to me that she wouldn't waste a moment telling him about what she had found in my art studio and what it meant. I felt sorrier for him than I did for myself, for I knew how devastating this would be on top of what had already occurred. Whipped about by what he considered divine retribution for some past sins, he absorbed Daphne's revelations like a condemned man hearing that his final appeal for mercy had been denied. He offered no resistance to her decision to shut up my art studio and end my private art lessons, nor did he utter a single word of protest when she sentenced me to what amounted to practically house arrest.

Naturally, I was not to see or speak to Beau. In fact, I was forbidden to use the telephone. I was to return home directly from school each and every day and either assist Mrs. Warren with Gisselle's needs or do my homework. To reinforce her ironclad hold over me and Daddy, Daphne called me into the study and cross-examined me in his presence, just to prove to him that beyond a doubt, I was as bad as she had predicted I would be.

"You have conducted yourself like a little tramp," she declared, "even using your art talents as a way to be sexually promiscuous. And in my house!