She sat and ate her scone and drank her tea and looked out at a laburnum-tree and a hawthorn-tree, all leafless and dripping on the background of ornamental red brick opposite. All the houses were of red brick and all so singularly alike in spite of their adventurous excrescences. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” thought Alix, as she watched the tea-time lights come out in the bow-windows with Gothic points over them, and felt that they held learned, innocent people who would not be disconcerted by anything that happened in the universe. She had never seen a place that seemed to her quite so safe as the Banbury Road. And yet such safety made part of the tristesse. Dieu! how triste it was! How dreadful it would be to be caught and imprisoned there.
Miss Grace came to draw the curtain and asked Alix if she were warm and Alix said she was. Giles seemed quite at home, seemed, indeed, part of it, lifting the scones from the little brass stand before the fire, talking about municipal elections to Miss Jennifer and about the Bach Choir to Miss Grace. With Giles as the link of identity between them, she saw that Heathside was part of the Banbury Road, too. Even Giles seemed far away as the sense of alienation grew within her.
Then as she sat there, alone, apart, the throb of a big motor came up to the gate, and a moment afterwards a lady was among them who, by her presence, dispelled the sense of loneliness. It might have been into Maman’s salon that she came, so vivid was Alix’s sense of knowing what she would do and say and of liking both beforehand. All furs and pearls and softness, and such sweet smiles, she was one of the people who could see and blow and catch the soap-bubbles, the beautiful, impalpable things of human intercourse, and while she talked to monsieur le professeur, she cast mild, bright glances at Giles, at Mrs. Bradley, at herself. Alix saw that it was at herself that she looked most, and presently, when the lady and Mrs. Bradley talked, Mrs. Bradley called her to them, and holding her hand, scanning her face, the lady said she knew her name. “It’s there behind me; where I don’t quite know;—in an old letter; a volume of mémoires; an ancestor of mine, I feel it must have been, who knew a Mouveray in Paris before the Revolution. Yes, that was it. It comes back to me. A comte Henri de Mouveray.”
Alix remembered, too. “He was guillotined at Lyon. He was a great-uncle of Grand-père’s.”
“And where is Grand-père?” asked Lady Mary Hamble, for such was her name. “Do you live with him?”
Alix told her that she had lived with him; but that he was dead. “I live with my mother in Paris,” she said.
When Lady Mary was gone, Alix felt herself scanned by Miss Grace and Miss Jennifer as if from a spaniel she had altered to a monkey; not more interesting, but more curious. Monsieur le professeur still didn’t see her at all. He brushed aside Lady Mary and went on talking about Relativity to Giles.
“Yes; was it not strange?” said Alix, as, in Giles’s rooms again, Mrs. Bradley commented on the romantic encounter. “There was his portrait at Montarel, that Henri de Mouveray. So grave yet so gay a face, blue-eyed, and with dark hair.”
“Like you, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, and Alix remembered that he was like her; very.
“And to think that someone so near you was guillotined at Lyon,” Mrs. Bradley mused. “He could have known your grandfather.”