This was no longer the stormy, unhappy Ellen who had run away with a drummer. This was Lilli Barr, a woman of the world, hard, successful, with smooth edges. She glittered a bit. She was too slippery ever to recapture. She sat there, in her chic, expensive clothes, self-possessed, remote, smiling, and a little restless, as if she were impatient to be gone already back into the nervous, superficial clatter of the life which had swallowed her.
The others would discover all this in time, later on. The Everlasting knew it at once.
At one o’clock, Robert summoned a taxi and drove with her to the Ritz. It was a strange, silent ride in which the brother and sister scarcely addressed each other. They were tired, and they were separated in age by nearly ten years. (Robert had been but ten when Ellen eloped.) The one was an artist, caught up for the moment in the delirium of success. The other sold bonds and was working at it with a desperate, plodding persistence. They might, indeed, have been strangers.
Ellen, watching in silence the silhouette of her brother’s snub nose and unruly red hair against the window of the taxicab, began to understand, with a perception almost as sharp as the old man’s, what it was that had happened. It made her sad and a little fearful lest she should discover that Rebecca had already gone to bed and she would find herself alone in the gaudy hotel. She was afraid, more and more of late, to be left alone.
Still, she reflected, there would be Hansi ... for company ... Hansi, a big, black, wolfish dog who devoted himself to her with a fanatic affection.
And the thought of Hansi turned her memories in the direction of Paris, which lay safe for the time being from the Germans; for Hansi reminded her always of Callendar and the day, just before they left for Vienna, when a fat little old man brought the dog with a note to the house in the Rue Raynouard.... A note which read ... “I send you Hansi because he is like you. He will look well by your side and be devoted to you. He may remind you sometimes of me, even in the midst of wild applause. It would be easy now to forget one who has known since the beginning that you were a great artist.
C”
That was all ... just a line or two, but enough to remind her of what she had forgotten—the awful sense of his patience, which seemed always to say with a shrug that all life was merely a matter of waiting.
The solid voice of Robert roused her.
“Here we are,” he said, and stepping from the cab, she was washed for an instant by the brilliant white glare of electricity and then vanished through the whirling doors into the Ritz.