“What time is it?” asked Miss Ingate.
Tommy looked at her wrist-watch.
“Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me!” cried Audrey.
“We might get a taxi in the Rue de Babylone,” Tommy suggested. “Or shall we walk?”
“We must walk,” cried Audrey.
She knew the name of the street. In the distance she could recognise the dying lights of the café-restaurant where they had eaten. She felt already like an inhabitant of the dreamed-of city. It was almost inconceivable to her that she had been within it for only a few hours, and that England lay less than a day behind her in the past, and Moze less than two days. And Aguilar the morose, and the shuttered rooms of Flank Hall, shot for an instant into her mind and out again.
The other two women walked rather quickly, mesmerised possibly by the magic of the illustrious Christian name, and Audrey gave occasional schoolgirlish leaps by their side. A little policeman appeared inquisitive from a by-street, and Audrey tossed her head as if saying: “Pooh! I belong here. All the mystery of this city is mine, and I am as at home as in Moze Street.”
And as they surged through the echoing solitude of the boulevard, and as they crossed the equally tremendous boulevard that cut through it east and west, Tommy told the story of Nick’s previous relations with Rosamund. Nick had met Rosamund once before through her English chum, Betty Burke, an art student who had ultimately sacrificed art to the welfare of her sex, but who with Mrs. Burke had shared rooms and studio with Nick for many months. Tommy’s narrative was spotted with hardly perceptible sarcasms concerning art, women, Betty Burke, Mrs. Burke, and Nick; but she put no barb into Rosamund. And when Miss Ingate, who had never met Rosamund, asked what Rosamund amounted to in the esteem of Tommy, Tommy evaded the question. Miss Ingate remembered, however, what she had said in the café-restaurant.
Then they turned into the Rue Delambre, and Tommy halted them in the deep obscurity in front of another of those huge black doors which throughout Paris seemed to guard the secrets of individual life. An automobile was waiting close by. A little door in the huge one clicked and yielded, and they climbed over a step into black darkness.
“Thompkins!” called Miss Thompkins loudly to the black darkness, to reassure the drowsy concierge in his hidden den, shutting the door with a bang behind them; and, groping for the hands of the others, she dragged them forward stumbling.