“Oui, je suis chanteuse,” Sylvia replied.
Neither of the sisters used the second person singular: the conversation, which was desultory, like the conversation of travelers in a railway carriage, ended abruptly as if the train had entered a tunnel.
“Vous êtes très-bien ici,” said Sylvia, looking round. The train had emerged and was running through a dull cutting.
“Oui, je suis très-bien ici,” Valentine replied.
There was no hostility between the sisters; there was merely a blank, a sundering stretch of twelve years, that dismayed both of them with its tracklessness. Presently Sylvia noticed a photograph upon the wall so conspicuously framed as to justify a supposition that it represented the man who was responsible for Valentine’s well-being.
“Oui, c’est mon amant,” said Valentine, in reply to the unspoken question.
Sylvia was faced by the problem of commenting satisfactorily upon a photograph. To begin with, it was one of those photographs that preserve the individual hairs of the mustache but eradicate every line from the face. It was impossible to comment on it, and it would have been equally impossible to comment on the original in person. The only fact emerging from the photograph was that in addition to a mustache the subject of it owned a pearl tie-pin; but even of the genuineness of the pearl it was unable to give any assurance.
“Photographs tell one nothing, do they?” Sylvia said, at last. “They’re like somebody else’s dreams.”
Valentine knitted her brows in perplexity.
“Or somebody else’s baby,” Sylvia went on, desperately.