“That is well, then,” Alix smiled. “You haven’t been ill, Giles?”
“Ill! Rather not! I’m as right as rain,” said Giles; and he added, hastily she felt: “But I say, you’re quite different. What is it? Your clothes? Your hair?”
“Maman thought I was getting too old for short hair. It is taken back from my forehead, too. It makes me very digne, I assure you. And my skirts are nearly as long, you see, as anybody’s skirts.”
Alix wore a dark blue dress and a dark blue cape, buttoned with little buttons on her breast and showing a satin lining of striped grey and blue. Her shoes and stockings were grey, and her loose, long gloves, and her soft little hat curving down over her brows with the big bow knotted at the side. Maman had made her, though so sober, very chic, and Giles was taking it all in; as far as he could; and that, she feared, with tender irony, was not very far.
Giles, as they moved along the platform, pursued the topic of her appearance, feeling it evidently opportune. He did not wish to speak about his own. “It’s that you look so tremendously foreign;—the way you walk; the way your things are put on; the way your hat comes down like that. Even the way you speak English is as French as possible, for anyone who speaks it perfectly; and I’d never noticed that before.”
“When you first met me,” said Alix, putting the obvious explanation with mild competence before him, “what chiefly engaged your attention was that I spoke English at all. Now you notice that though I speak it so well I speak with my French accent. I am French, Giles.” She slightly smiled round at him, for she need not emphasize it. He as well as she would remember their last talk on the cliff-path. “I am a foreigner.”
“I suppose you are,” said Giles, and it was gravely, almost gloomily that he said so.
“Was the walking tour a success?” Alix asked him, while they waited at the customs, Alix’s box, this time, being larger than the last and subjected to the vicissitudes of a separate transit. “You did not overtire yourself? You look a little tired, you know.”
“Do I really? I haven’t been sleeping very well; it’s been so hot. Cornwall was a great success. I want you to see Cornwall some day.”
“It has been hot in Paris, too. But I always love Paris at this season, the stones all baked with sun, the trees all bronze. We have been dining in the Bois almost every night, at a little restaurant under the trees. It has been delicious. And the drive back down the avenue du Bois.—Calme-toi, mon chéri,” she addressed the kitten who was wailing.