"Why don't you go to Bucharest? Why in the devil's name does any one want to be anywhere but in a neutral country in these times? Go to the Rumanian consul and get your passport visé for Bucharest, and for the love of God leave me in peace! Can't you see I'm busy this evening?"
Sylvia accepted the manager's suggestion and set out to find the consul: by this time it was too late to obtain a visa that night, and she was forced to sleep in Warsaw—a grim experience that remained as a memory of distant guns booming through a penetrating reek of onions. In the morning the guns were quieter, and there was a rumor that for the third time the German thrust for Warsaw had been definitely foiled. Sylvia, however, could not get over the impression of the evening before, and what the manager had suggested to rid himself of an importunate woman she accepted as a clear indication of the direction she ought to follow.
In the waiting-room of the Rumanian Consulate there was an excessively fat girl who told Sylvia that she was an accompanist anxious, like herself, to get to Bucharest. Sylvia took the occasion to ask her if she thought there was a certainty of being engaged in Bucharest, and the fat girl was fairly encouraging. She told Sylvia that she was a Bohemian from Prague who had been warned by the Russian police that she would do well to seek another country.
"And will you get an engagement?" Sylvia asked.
"Oh, well, if I don't, I may as well starve in Bucharest as in Warsaw," she replied.
There seemed something ludicrous in the notion of any one so fat as this starving; the accompanist seemed to divine Sylvia's thoughts, for she laughed bitterly.
"I dare say you think I'm pretending, but ever since I was warned, I've been scraping together the money to reach Bucharest somehow; I haven't eaten a proper meal for a month. But the less I eat the fatter I seem to get."
Sylvia was vexed that the poor girl should have guessed what she was thinking, and she went out of her way to ask her advice on the smallest details of the proposed journey; she knew that there was nothing that restored a person's self-respect like a request for advice. The fat girl, whose name inappropriately for a Bohemian appeared to be Lottie, cheered up, as Sylvia had anticipated, and brimmed over with recommendations about work in Bucharest.
"You'd better go to the management of the Petit Maxim. You're a singer, aren't you? Of course Bucharest is very gay and terribly expensive. You're English, aren't you? You are lucky. But fancy leaving England now! Still, if you don't get any work you'll be able to go to your consul and he'll send you home. I'll be able to get home, too, from Bucharest, but I don't know if I want to. All my friends used to be French and English girls. I never cared much for Austrians and Germans. But now I get called sale boche if I open my mouth. How do you explain this war? It seems very unnecessary, doesn't it?"
"I don't want to be inquisitive," said Sylvia. "But I wish you'd tell me why you're called Lottie."