Hardross beheld her sink, stricken with some trouble, into an armchair, beating her hands together.
“I have no influence, gone it is, no power over her, none whatever. What is to be done? Assist us please. She has been so.... O, for days, and now it comes, it comes....”
“What has come?” he interrupted sharply.
“I cannot believe it of her, but it is true ... as God. She is like a vast ... cold ... stone, a mountain.”
“Is this about Julia?”
“She will not go. Of course she will not go! She declines, she will not come back to Odessa. She says she will not come. I have to tell you this, Mr. Hardross, I cannot move her. She is like a vast ... cold ... stone. What then?”
Madame’s appeal seemed pregnant with a significance that he but dimly savoured. He asked: “What is she going to do then?”
“To stop in this England, here, in this very place! But our passages are booked, tomorrow it is—pooh, it does not matter!—I am to leave her here in this place, here she will stay, in a foreign land, without speech or understanding. But what is to be done, I ask of you?”
He was delirious himself; he kept whispering Julia, Julia, but he managed to ask with a lugubrious covering of propriety:
“What? I don’t know. Shall I go to her?”