Each phrase had sounded comic as he read it aloud, and his voice ended with such a queer note that Anne burst out laughing.
“You think I oughtn’t to go to her?” she said.
“It is ridiculous to think of it,” he answered. “Not for your father’s sake but for your own. It would be out of the frying-pan into the fire: surely you see that?”
She did not answer, and he went on: “Why should you choose to live with the horrid old woman who wrote this letter, in a London suburb? If you must leave home....”
“I must....” she said. “Better anything, however horrid it may sound. If I do not get away from home, I shall never be able to speak to anyone.”
There was a long silence while she watched Richard Sotheby wrinkling up his nose.
“You may be more unhappy when you can speak, Anne. Particularly if you should fall in love. That makes one more unhappy than anything else. However, you would do better to go as an English governess in a French family. In that way you would see new people and have quite fresh experiences.”
And Richard Sotheby began to speak of Paris, while Anne sat fascinated by the magic flow of words, seeing pictures of a great town full of avenues and open spaces, with a twisting river, crossed by innumerable bridges. And for some reason, though she knew that Paris was a huge city, and though Richard spoke often of the crowds thronging the boulevards, she imagined Paris as a willow-pattern plate; its bridges like that steep bridge over which a blue figure is hurrying, with bald-headed Chinamen fishing in the winding river beside it on which a barge is floating, a lady is disembarking, and weeping willow trees border the Elysian fields.
The voice went on, Anne watching the fine forehead and the abstracted eyes gazing into the fire, was carried away by her imagination and saw herself living in the willow-pattern city.
“That will be wonderful,” she said. “But what am I to say in my letter to Mrs. Crowlink?”