She was not happy, it would be stretching the truth to say she was content, but she was resigned, she was patient, she waited not altogether without confidence....
All the same, sometimes, as she sat, day in day out, on her high stool, looking down on familiar aspects of life’s fermentation as it manifests in public restaurants, or peering out of the windows to catch tantalizing glimpses of its freer, ampler, and—alas!—more recondite phases—sometimes Sofia wondered whether there were not grimly cynic innuendo in those three words which the mystery of choice had affixed to the window-panes and graven so deep into her soul.
For surely she was in exile there, an exile from all the fun and frolic and, fury of life, marooned in weary isolation, on a high stool, in a frowsty table d’hôte, in the living heart of London.
II
MASKS AND FACES
Quite naturally she became acquainted with Faces....
She grew adept at a game which consisted mostly in keeping close watch upon those who for this reason or that engaged her attention, without giving them the slightest reason to suspect she was doing anything of the sort.
One could not always be staring in abstraction at nothing in particular as it passed to and fro on the sidewalk in front of the Café des Exiles; one could not often or for long at a time succeed in reading a book held open in one’s lap, below the level of the cashier’s desk, Mama Thérèse was too brisk for that; one had to do something with one’s mind; and it was sometimes diverting to watch and speculate about people who looked interesting.
There were so many Faces, they came and went so constantly, like bubbles in a tideway, that to Sofia most of them seemed indistinguishable one from another, mere blurs of flesh colour studded with staring eyes and slitted by apertures which automatically and alternately gaped to receive gobbets of food and goblets of drink and closed to gulp them down. A man needed to be remarkable for something in his looks, not necessarily pulchritude, or for uncommon individuality, for Sofia to favour him with more than one of her seemingly casual glances or to remember him if he visited the café a second time.
But those there were who stood out from the rank and file, for whom she watched, whom she missed if they failed to put in appearance at their accustomed hours, about whom her idle but able imagination wove wonderful fantasies, enduing them with histories and environments as far removed from fact as the drab dreams of the realists are from the picturesque commonplaces of everyday.