“Alors, au revoir, Valentine.”
They hesitated, both of them, to see which would offer her cheek first; in the end they managed to be simultaneous.
“Even the farewell was a stalemate,” Sylvia said to herself on the way down-stairs.
She wondered, while she was walking back to her hotel, what was going to be the passion of her own life. One always started out with a dim conception of perfect love, however one might scoff at it openly in self-protection, but evidently it by no means followed that love for a man, let alone perfect love, would ever arrive. Lily had succeeded in inspiring at least one man with love for her, but she had found her own passion in roulette with Camacho tacked to it, inherited like a husband’s servant, familiar with any caprice, but jealous and irritable. Valentine had found her grand passion in a bath-room that satisfied even her profoundest maternal instincts. Dorothy had loved a coronet with such fervor that she had been able to abandon everything that could smirch it. Sylvia’s own mother had certainly found at thirty-four her grand passion, but Sylvia felt that it would be preferable to fall in love with a bath-room now than wait ten years for a Henry.
Sylvia reached the hotel, packed up her things, and set out to Paris without any definite plans in her head for the future, and just because she had no definite plans and nothing to keep her from sleeping, she could not sleep and tossed about on the wagon-lit half the night.
“It’s not as if I hadn’t got money. I’m amazingly lucky. It’s really fantastic luck to find somebody like poor old Carlos to set me up for five years of luxurious independence. I suppose if I were wise I should buy a house in London—and yet I don’t want to go back to London. The trouble with me is that, though I like to be independent, I don’t like to be alone. Yet with Michael.... But what’s the use of thinking about him? Do I actually miss him? No, certainly not. He’s nothing more to me than something I might have had, but failed to secure. I’m regretting a missed experience. If one loses somebody like that, it leaves a sense of incompletion. How often does one feel a quite poignant regret because one has forgotten to finish a cup of coffee; but the regret is always for the incomplete moment; it doesn’t endure. Michael in a year will have changed; I’ve changed, also. There is nothing to suggest that if we met again now, we should meet in the same relation, with the same possibility in the background of our intercourse. Then why won’t I go back to Mulberry Cottage? Obviously because I have out-lived Mulberry Cottage. I don’t want to stop my course by running into a backwater that’s already been explored. I want to go on and on until ... yes, until what? I can travel now, if I want to. Well, why shouldn’t I travel? If I visit my agent in Paris—and I certainly shall visit him in order to tell him what I think of the management of that damned Casino at Rio—he’ll offer me another contract to sing in some outlandish corner of the globe, and if I weren’t temporarily independent, I should have to accept it with all its humiliations. Merely to travel would be a mistake I think. I’ve got myself into the swirl of mountebanks, and somehow I must continue with them. It’s a poor little loyalty, but even that is better than nothing. Really, if one isn’t tied down by poverty, one can have a very good time, traveling the world as a singer. Or I could live in Paris for a while. I should soon meet amusing people. Oh, I don’t know what I want. I should rather like to get hold of Olive again. She may be married by now. She probably is married. She’s bound to be married. A superfluity of romantic affection was rapidly accumulating that must have been deposited somewhere by now. I might get Gainsborough out from England to come with me. Come with me, where? It seems a shame to uproot the poor old thing again. She’s nearly sixty. But I must have somebody.”
When Sylvia reached Paris she visited two trunks that were in a repository. Among other things she took out the volume of Adlington’s Apuleius.
“Yes, there’s no doubt I’m still an ass,” she said. “And since the Argentine really a golden ass; but oh, when, when, when shall I eat the rose-leaves and turn into Sylvia again? One might make a joke about that, as the White Knight said, something about Golden and Silver and Argentine.”
Thinking of jokes reminded Sylvia of Mr. Pluepott, and thinking of Alice through the looking-glass brought back the Vicar. What a long way off they seemed.