And yet he was just the same as ever.... Not quite so tall, perhaps, as she had remembered him ... or she had grown taller.... He was pleased to see her, she was sure, but he had nothing much to say until they reached the Lion. The Lion was most helpful....
Justin explained to Laura that it was a Neo-Classic Lion, and therefore less admirable than the Lions in Trafalgar Square, which were from life—Zoo life. “I see!” said Laura. She was sure he must have been reading the same biography, but she thought she had better not ask him. But she did ask him why he approved of the Trafalgar Square Lions, when he had so often girded at ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ in Green Gates parlour. Justin, warming, said that Landseer was a photographer, but that photography was honester than imitation anyway, and explained that Thorwaldsen had got his ideas from the Assyrian plaques in the British Museum. They would look them up one day when they got home again and then she would see. All this, and now that he was once started, so very much more, with such a familiar air of unburdening himself, such an assumption of her entire interest, such an implied re-definition of her status as his particular property, that the ghost melted away again, as it always did when Justin smiled at her, and she said defiantly to the Lion—
“I don’t care. I like him this way.”
CHAPTER XIII
Up and up and up went the train and Laura’s spirits with it. Mrs. Cloud was in one corner of the compartment and Justin in the other, and there were two squares of glass, unlike prim English carriage windows, opening upon wonders, black mountains and clouds and brilliant grass, and under their feet, but far below, the terraced lines of the track over which they had already passed. Sometimes a drift of white hid them. Laura thought that it was smoke, but Justin said “no—clouds.” Imagine! She was so high up that she was looking down on clouds!
Justin laughed at her.
“Beats Beech Hill, doesn’t it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” she said instantly; but she grew more and more excited. And all the time they talked to her and she to them—though Justin was quieter than she thought he need be when he hadn’t seen her for two years—of all things under the sun and of how glad she was to see them: and the train climbed higher and higher. It stopped once, at a snow-covered siding, for them to drink coffee in inch-thick cups, and the coffee or the air, the air that was like old still wine, must have gone to Laura’s head a little. She certainly talked too much, fluttering like a distracted butterfly between Paris and Justin, and the right-hand window and the left-hand window, and how was Gran’papa and Savonarola and cushions for Mrs. Cloud. She did not even stop in the tunnel. And the discarded ghost of a disappointment found that Laura was not the only person in the carriage worth haunting. Justin had smoked himself into one of his silences. He was not sure that Laura was improved. Her voice was rather high. He thought that she was showing off.
He was right. She was so desperately anxious that they should be pleased with her: and excitement had oiled her discretion. She could not resist marshalling all her acquirements at once for their inspection.