Morera did not bother her any more. With all his exterior foolishness he had a very deep perception of individual humanity. There was a boat sailing for Marseilles in a day or two, and he bought a ticket for Sylvia.
“It’s a return ticket,” he told her. “It’s good for a year.”
She assured him that even if she came back it could never be to marry him, but he insisted upon her keeping it, and to please him she yielded.
Sylvia left the Argentine worth nearly as much as Lily when she went away from Brazil, and as if her luck was bent upon an even longer run, she gained heavily at poker all the way back across the Atlantic.
When she reached Marseilles, Sylvia conceived a longing to meet Valentine again, and she telegraphed to Elène at Brussels for her address. It was with a quite exceptional anticipation that Sylvia asked the concierge if Madame Lataille was in. While she walked up-stairs to her sister’s apartment she remembered how she had yearned to be friends with Valentine nearly thirteen years ago, forgetting all about the disappointment of her hope in a sudden desire to fill up a small corner of her present loneliness.
Valentine had always lingered in Sylvia’s imagination as a rather wild figure, headstrong to such a pitch where passion was concerned that she herself had always felt colorless and insignificant in comparison. There was something splendidly tropical about Valentine as she appeared to Sylvia’s fancy; in all the years after she quitted France she had cherished a memory of Valentine’s fiery anger on the night of her departure as something nobly independent.
Like other childish memories, Sylvia found Valentine much less impressive when she met her again—much less impressive, for instance, than Elène, who, though she had married a shopkeeper and had settled down to a most uncompromising and ordinary respectability, retained a ripening outward beauty that made up for any pinching of the spirit. Here was Valentine, scarcely even pretty, who achieved by neatness any effect of personality that she did. She had fine eyes—it seemed impossible for any of her mother’s children to avoid them, however dull and inexpressive might have been the father’s. Sylvia was thinking of Henry’s eyes, but what she had heard of M. Lataille in childhood had never led her to picture him as more remarkable outwardly than her own father.
“Twelve years since we met,” Valentine was murmuring, and Sylvia was agreeing and thinking to herself all the time how very much compressed Valentine was, not uncomfortably or displeasingly, but like a new dress before it has blossomed to the individuality of the wearer. There recurred to Sylvia out of the past a likeness between Valentine and Maudie Tilt when Maudie had dressed up for the supper-party with Jimmy Monkley.
When the first reckonings of lapsed years were over there did not seem much to talk about, but presently Sylvia described with much detail the voyage from La Plata to Marseilles, just as, when one takes up a long-interrupted correspondence, great attention is often devoted to the weather at the moment.
“Alors, vous êtes chanteuse?” Valentine asked.