“You are a sly hypocrite. But I vowed I would not come downstairs this morning until you had come up again to find me. You see your tricks don’t work.”
“For all you know I might have gone out with the American ladies.”
“I should have stayed here all day.”
“We are scandal enough as it is in this hotel,” she answered.
“Just as we were at Dijon.”
“If you will go down alone to breakfast, naturally you cause a scandal. People think something dreadful must have happened. They see that you care nothing for me, Anne. Love means nothing to you.”
Her looks were a sufficient answer to his reproaches, and he was silent as she seized him and bent over him.
“Keep still,” she whispered. Looking up, Grandison could see the ceiling of the darkened room striped with bars of light from the upturned slats of the shutters. Outside, the sunlight poured into the grilling street; an electric tram passed by, its passage announced by the swishing of overhead wires and followed by the crackling of electric sparks. Wrapped in the weakness of love, Anne and Grandison lay at each other’s mercy; each tiny movement was agony to them.
“Keep still! Keep still!” A cry broke from their lips, and then, in the solitude of perfect unity, they fell asleep. The overhead wires swished, an electric tram lurched past the hotel on grinding wheels, above which the soft crackle of electricity came like the sound of a silk skirt. Already the American ladies had left the hotel, the waiter in the courtyard had cleared away the cold coffee and the uneaten rolls; the forgotten letter had been handed in at the manager’s office; the chambermaid had looked through the keyhole and had gone away to wash vegetables in the kitchen, before either husband or wife spoke.
“What time is the bus?” he asked, girding his silk trowsers with a sash.