“Yes, I’ve got the rooms,” I nearly shouted. “But where is Madame?”
“She’s been looking after the luggage,” he panted. “Here she comes, now.”
Not this baby walking beside the old porter as though he were her nurse and had just lifted her out of her ugly perambulator while he trundled the boxes on it.
“And she’s not Madame,” said Dick, drawling suddenly.
At that moment she caught sight of him and hailed him with her minute muff. She broke away from her nurse and ran up and said something, very quick, in English; but he replied in French: “Oh, very well. I’ll manage.”
But before he turned to the porter he indicated me with a vague wave and muttered something. We were introduced. She held out her hand in that strange boyish way Englishwomen do, and standing very straight in front of me with her chin raised and making—she too—the effort of her life to control her preposterous excitement, she said, wringing my hand (I’m sure she didn’t know it was mine), Je ne parle pas Français.
“But I’m sure you do,” I answered, so tender, so reassuring, I might have been a dentist about to draw her first little milk tooth.
“Of course she does.” Dick swerved back to us. “Here, can’t we get a cab or taxi or something? We don’t want to stay in this cursed station all night. Do we?”
This was so rude that it took me a moment to recover; and he must have noticed, for he flung his arm round my shoulder in the old way, saying: “Ah, forgive me, old chap. But we’ve had such a loathsome, hideous journey. We’ve taken years to come. Haven’t we?” To her. But she did not answer. She bent her head and began stroking her grey muff; she walked beside us stroking her grey muff all the way.
“Have I been wrong?” thought I. “Is this simply a case of frenzied impatience on their part? Are they merely ‘in need of a bed,’ as we say? Have they been suffering agonies on the journey? Sitting, perhaps, very close and warm under the same travelling rug?” and so on and so on while the driver strapped on the boxes. That done——