Thirty-five minutes later Noelle returned with a breakfast tray. On it were freshly squeezed orange juice, a delicious sausage-and-chive omelet, heated, buttered croissants and jam and a pot of black coffee. It tasted extraordinarily good.
“ Aren’ t you having anything?” Gautier asked.
Noelle shook her head.“ No.” She was seated in an easy chair watching him as he ate. She looked even more beautiful wearing his dressing gown open at the top, revealing the curves of her delicious breasts. Her hair was tousled and carefree.
Armand Gautier had radically revised his earlier estimate of Noelle. She was not any man’ s quick lay; she was an absolute treasure. However, he had met many treasures in his career in the theater, and he was not about to spend his time and talent as a director on a starry-eyed amateur who wanted to break into the theater, no matter how beautiful she might be, or how skilled in bed. Gautier was a dedicated man who took his art seriously. He had refused to compromise it in the past, and he was not about to start now.
The evening before, he had planned to spend the night with Noelle and send her packing in the morning. Now as he ate his breakfast and studied her, he was trying to figure out a way to hold onto Noelle as a mistress until he got bored with her, without encouraging her as an actress. He knew that he had to hold out some bait. He felt his way cautiously.“ Are you planning to marry Philippe Sorel?” he asked.
“ Of course not,” Noelle replied.“ That is not what I want.” Now it was coming.“ What do you want?” Gautier asked.“ I told you,” Noelle said quietly.“ I want to be an actress.”
Gautier bit into another croissant, stalling for time.“ Of course,” he said. Then he added,“ There are many fine dramatic coaches I could send you to, Noelle, who would …”
“ No,” she said. Noelle was watching him pleasantly, warmly, as though eager to accede to anything he suggested. And yet Gautier had a feeling that inside her was a core of steel. There were many ways she could have said“ no.” With anger, reproach, disappointment, sulking, but she had said it with softness. And absolute finality. This was going to be more difficult than he had anticipated. For a moment Armand Gautier was tempted to tell her, as he told dozens of girls every week, to go away, that he had no time to waste on her. But he thought of the incredible sensations he had experienced during the night and he knew he would be a fool to let her go so soon. She was surely worth a slight, a very slight, compromise.
“ Very well,” Gautier said.“ I will give you a play to study. When you have memorized it, you will read it to me and we will see how much talent you have. Then we can decide what to do with you.”
“ Thank you, Armand,” she said. There was no triumph in her words, nor even any pleasure that he could detect. Just a simple acknowledgment of the inevitable. For the first time Gautier felt a small twinge of doubt. But that of course was ridiculous. He was a master at handling women.