Sylvia looked at the daguerreotype of her grandmother, a glass faintly bloomed, the likeness of a ghost indeed. She then had loved an Englishman; her mother, too; herself.... Sylvia packed the daguerreotype out of sight and turned to look at a golden shawl of a material rather like crêpe de Chine, which had been used to wrap up their mother when she was a baby. Would Sylvia like it? It was no use to Elène, too old and frail and faded. Sylvia stayed in Brussels for a week and left with many promises to return soon. She was glad she had paid the visit; for it had given back to her the sense of continuity which in the shifting panorama of her life she had lost, so that she had come to regard herself as an unreal person, an exception in humanity, an emotional freak; this separation from the rest of the world had been irksome to Sylvia since she had discovered the possibility of her falling in love, because it was seeming the cause of her not being loved. Henceforth she would meet man otherwise than with defiance or accusation in her eyes; she, too, perhaps would meet a lover thus.
Sylvia folded up the golden shawl to put it at the bottom of her trunk; figuratively, she wrapped up in it her memories, tender, gay, sorrowful, vile all together.
“Soon be in Paris, shall we?” said Mrs. Gainsborough, when the train reached the eastern suburbs. “It makes one feel quite naughty, doesn’t it? The captain was always going to take me, but we never went, somehow. What’s that? There’s the Eiffel Tower? So it is, upon my word, and just what it looks like in pictures. Not a bit different. I hope it won’t fall down while we’re still in Paris. Nice set-out that would be. I’ve always been afraid of sky accidents since a friend of mine, a Mrs. Ewings, got stuck in the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court with a man who started undressing himself. It was all right, as it happened, because he only wanted to wave his shirt to his wife, who was waiting for him down below, so as she shouldn’t get anxious, but it gave Mrs. Ewings a nasty turn. Two hours she was stuck with nothing in her bag but a box of little liver pills, which made her mouth water, she said, she was that hungry. She thinks she’d have eaten them if she’d have been alone; but the man, who was an undertaker from Wandsworth, told her a lot of interesting stories about corpses, and that kept her mind occupied till the wheel started going round again, and the Exhibition gave her soup and ten shillings compensation, which made a lot of people go up in it on the chance of being stuck.”
It was strange, Sylvia thought, that she should be as ignorant of Paris as Mrs. Gainsborough, but somehow the three of them would manage to enjoy themselves. Lily was more nearly vivacious than she had ever known her.
“Quite saucy,” Mrs. Gainsborough vowed. “But there, we’re all young, and you soon get used to the funny people you see in France. After all, they’re foreigners. We ought to feel sorry for them.”
“I say steady, Mrs. Gainsborough,” Lily murmured, with a frown. “Some of these people in the carriage may speak English.”
“Speak English?” Mrs. Gainsborough repeated. “You don’t mean to tell me they’d go on jabbering to one another in French if they could speak English! What an idea!”
A young man who had got into the compartment at Chantilly had been casting glances of admiration at Lily ever since, and it was on account of him that she had warned Mrs. Gainsborough. He was a slim, dark young man dressed by an English tailor, very diffident for a Frenchman, but when Sylvia began to speculate upon the choice of a hotel he could no longer keep silence and asked in English if he could be of any help. When Sylvia replied to him in French, he was much surprised:
“Mais vous êtes française!”
“Je suis du pays de la lune,” Sylvia said.