Grandison flushed with anger, but Richard forestalled anything he might have said by adding: “My dear, you know I am fond of Ginette; don’t misunderstand what I say. But two women is more than I can put up with....”
“Why on earth will you persist in regarding Ginette as a woman?” demanded the younger man in tones of fury. “Woman! woman! It’s always woman with you. Ginette is Ginette, just as I am Gerald and you are Richard.”
Sotheby did not reply, and his friend’s angry tones soon subsided. Harmony was restored while the breakfast dishes were cleared away, and for the rest of the morning Anne’s arrival was discussed calmly, sometimes in English, sometimes in French, while the two men painted and Ginette posed. In the evening everything that had been said in the morning was repeated, but at last it was decided that Grandison should meet Anne at the station, instead of Richard, and that he should take her to an hotel.
“Let it be on the other side of Paris,” said Richard next morning, as he and Grandison left the studio on their way to the station, for he had decided to accompany his friend in order to point out the girl whom he was to meet.
“Everything in France is different,” Anne said to herself as she looked out of the window of the train. “Those trees must be elms, but they have been shaved like French poodles so that they are scarcely recognizable. These are fields of corn, and here are cocks and hens and cart-sheds, but they do not seem to be the real things so much as imitations of ours. And the houses! How extraordinarily different are the houses!” for the train was passing through a station, and building after building flashed by her: dreary houses with the stucco peeling off them, each with its broken-slatted shutters beside the windows, houses such as do not exist in England.
“If there is any beauty in this country it is of another kind from our English beauty, just as the ugliness is unlike our ugliness.” The change did not dismay her; it had the same effect of strangeness as the reflection of her own cropped head in the glass, seen unexpectedly as she lifted her handbag from off the luggage rack.
The train was approaching Paris, and before many minutes had passed a porter in a blue blouse had seized upon her handbag and Anne forgot to look for Richard Sotheby in the effort to produce a good impression on the porter. But even the inadequacy of her French could not detain him for more than a moment. His moustache trembled eagerly, his eye flashed, then he had disappeared.
“What a lovely outline there is to his cheek, how clear his complexion, how expressive his every movement!” and looking after the porter she began to fancy that if all Frenchmen were as handsome as the porter she would be in love with them all. “The beauty of the French face,” she said, “lies in the beauty of the cheekbones. An English face is made up of eyes and nose and mouth: the rest of the face is a blank space, but take away a Frenchman’s eyes: so often like eggs, or olives, take away his nose, and his mouth (always an uninteresting mouth) and you find his face is still full of expression and of beauty, indeed the face is improved.”
But the porter was back, and had set off down the platform with a commanding gesture to Anne to follow him, when she found herself being accosted by a stranger.
“Is this Miss Dunnock? My name’s Grandison,” he said. “Richard Sotheby asked me to meet you here; he is not able to come himself....”