“I must come back sometimes, I suppose, on business ... and to see Marie,” she said.
“What business? I look after the Family property. You will have your place at all the official ceremonies at which, for the honour of the Family and in Marie’s interests, we must be seen together. In as large a Family as ours there are often weddings, I am glad to say, and funerals as well. I shall be surprised, for instance, if Uncle Martin lasts until the autumn: that will be an opportunity, since you seem to be getting tired of your independence already.”
A policeman on horseback came up with a whistle at his lips, opened an invisible sluice, and an army of pedestrians hurried across the dark roadway before the wave of taxis submerged them once more. “I ought to have gone out one night,” she thought, “on to the great moors of the South, like Daguerre: I ought to have walked through the stunted pines of that evil land,—walked until I was exhausted. I should not have had the courage to keep my head under water in one of the pools, as that Argelouse shepherd did last year, because his daughter-in-law starved him. But I could have lain down in the sand and shut my eyes.... It is true the crows and ants don’t wait until....”
She watched the stream of humanity, that living mass, in which her body would so soon be plunged and borne helpless away. She could do nothing now. Bernard pulled out his watch again.
“A quarter to eleven: just time to call at the hotel....”
“You won’t be very warm travelling.”
“No, and I shall have to cover myself up this evening in the car.”
She saw in her mind’s eye the speeding car, and seemed to feel the cold wind that smells of marshes, waste resin, burnt grass, mint, and mist. She looked at Bernard and smiled that smile that made the women of her country say in former days: “You can’t pretend she’s pretty, but then she is so charming.” If Bernard had said: “I forgive you; come ...” she would have got up and followed him. But Bernard, after a momentary feeling of irritation at his own emotion, was now only conscious of his detestation of anything odd, anything that departed from the daily round of behaviour and conversation. Bernard was made to fit the tracks, like his own carts; he could not move outside the ruts: and only when he had found them again, that very evening in the dining-room at Saint Clair, would he find peace and quiet once more.
“I want to ask your pardon for the last time, Bernard.” She spoke with great earnestness and with the intonation of despair,—a last effort to reopen the conversation: “Say no more,” he protested.