The way out of the ancient walled city led down a steep little cobbled street where houses leaned their heads together, like gossips over tea cups, and between whose stones grasses grew and the shadows of the late afternoon flung a welcome coolness. Then out past the tourney court where once gallant knights in full armor had fought for their ladies’ favor, and past the Porte d’Aude, which looked out over the lower and newer ... and uglier town.
“Where are you staying?” asked Cynthia. “Glory, but it’s good to talk to an American again! It’s been weeks since I have been able to.” She hadn’t quite been aware how much she had missed Nancy; had wished that Chick were here until she met someone from home.
“It is jolly to speak your own tongue again. We’re staying at the Chat d’Or, Aunt Anna and myself. We only got here today. And won’t you come and have dinner with us tonight? I’d love to have you.”
“I’d love to come. I’ve been here nearly a week now, and it’s worth every minute you can spend here too. Look!” and Cynthia clutched the other’s arm to turn her attention behind them.
Above the road they had descended, full in the glow of the late sun the city rose, golden pale against the southern sky; turrets and towers, battlements and barbicans, dreaming in the fairy-tale light exactly as they had dreamed for the past six hundred years and more.
“Lovely!” murmured the other, starry eyed. For just a moment Cynthia thought there were tears in her eyes, as well as stars, but she could understand that. Cynthia herself often felt teary when something was too beautiful to believe.
They took up this matter of dinner again. “It will be nice to eat somewhere else, neither of the two places I’ve tried are very good and I’m sick of the boiled veal and caramel custard at the Cheval Blanc,” said Cynthia. “And where the French ever got the idea they were a nation of born cooks! ... I know where your hotel is, suppose I run home now, my road goes this way and yours to the left, then I’ll get a bath and into a clean dress and be at your place ... when? About seven?”
There were three hotels in Carcassonne, one in the upper Cité, very grand and quaint, and with the grandest, quaintest prices too, and two in the lower town across the river Aude. Cynthia had taken a room at the station hotel, which was the first one she saw when she got off the train. It was at least cheap and convenient. Oh yes, and there was the Hotel de l’Universe, hardly worthy of the name of a hotel but displaying its grandiloquent appellation in gilt letters two feet high across its entire three room frontage. Cynthia had smiled at the name, for she had found in France that it was generally the smallest places that bore the biggest names.
The Universe looked cozy and very clean, and she had even thought of moving her suitcase inside its hospitable blue door, but had been too busy to carry out the thought. Often however she dined there and tonight as she crossed the square and passed the little red checked gingham curtains and the green painted iron tables on the terrace, she saw the American boy having a beer on the terrace, just as she had seen him every evening since she came. She smiled and waved a hand at him, and he very nearly smiled in return. Cynthia had an impulse to try once more to talk to him, as she had tried on the train, but immediately his gaze had returned morosely to the long lane of dusty plane trees that lined the street. Oh well, she wasn’t going to waste her time picking up someone who evidently didn’t want to be picked up. But when you travel for miles and miles, and hours and hours in the same railway coach with a chap, and you know he’s a fellow countryman, and hard up probably, like you are ... just look at the clothes he wore; neat, but not any product of Park Avenue, and when there’s scarcely another American in the Lower Town, not at least until today, why it would seem sort of pleasant to meet once or twice and have a talk. Cynthia gave a little skip of pleasure and forgot the boy on the terrace. Nice to have a dinner date, nice to be going to talk good old United States for an evening. Adventure was exciting ... afterwards, but it was pretty dull sometimes while it was happening.