"Do you see much of her?"
"No—nothing at all. She's been abroad, you know."
"Yes, so I heard. But I saw her driving yesterday. She looks different from the rest of them."
All this time, as he spoke to her, she was conscious of his eyes; if only she could have been sure that the protest in them was genuine she would have been moved by them.
She did not help him in any way, and perhaps her silence made him feel that he had done wrong to speak to her about his affairs. They looked at the square for a little time in silence. At last, speaking without any implied fierceness, he said:
"You know, Miss Rand, I'm a wanderer by nature, and sometimes I find cities very hard to bear. Do you know what I do?"
"No," she said.
"Turn them into other things. Now here in London, do you never think of streets as waterways? Portland Place, for instance, is like ever so many rivers I've seen, broad and shining. And some of those high thin streets beside it are like canals; Oxford Circus is a whirlpool, and so on——"
He laughed. "I get no end of relief from thinking of things like that."
"You hate cities?" she asked him.