"Do you know the sex of the sphinx?" she returned faintly, some hot inexplicable tears misting her eyes. "I have always been sure the sphinx must have been a man. Men are so subtle—especially mine."
"Somebody was saying that the Allonbys don't quite hit it off," her friend told her husband afterwards. "And it's my opinion that she doesn't know where he is. I wonder if he knows where she is?"
When the wife of the Allonby reached her shelter on the ridge that night, she avoided meeting anybody, especially Agatha, who was equally anxious to avoid meeting her, and for the same reason—that she had been having a good cry. But Agatha knew perfectly well why she had had recourse to those waters of comfort, while Ermengarde had not the remotest idea.
Having felt the usual relief from the world-old remedy, brushed out her hair, wrapped herself in a dressing-gown, and smelt M. Isidore's latest floral offering, Mrs. Allonby lighted a tall candle and set to work to master the contents of the publisher's parcel.
So that, when an orange and crimson sunrise came up gloriously out of a peacock green sea, it showed a woman asleep in an easy-chair by a guttering candle, her head on one arm on a table, and half-hidden in a cloud of fair hair, with a volume labelled "Storm and Stress" on the floor at her side.
Chapter XIV
At Turbia
"What Roman strength Turbia showed
In ruin by the mountain road.
How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco, basking, glowed."
"Little Monaco, basking," and glowing, too, as the poet says, sits on its rock that runs out into the sea, in a world of its own, cut off, distinct, aloof from the every-day world, like some enchanted princess, walled away from reality in a faery land by rose and fire. The tiny city, that is also a principality, with a tiny harbour and arsenal at the rock foot, and a castled palace where it joins the mainland, is little more than a stone's throw—less than a long-range rifle-shot—from Monte Carlo, but in atmosphere worlds away. It has nothing in common with it, except the deep gorge stretching behind both and backed by the craggy bastion of the Tête du Chien and the dark rich sea, that breaks impartially upon the rocky base of each.
You may step into a tram-car at the Casino out of a crowd of painted women, sporting men, Jews, semi-invalids, respectable tourists, and disreputable sharpers from every capital in Europe, and from some in Africa and America, and in five minutes find yourself in an impossible fairy region of tranquil beauty—a town that is partly Italian and partly dream-magic, scantily peopled by priests, nuns, lay-sisters in various garb and wide-winged cap, orphanage children, Monagask soldiers, a few peasant folk leaning from roof-gardens and loggias in narrow, silent streets, and a sprinkling of humble bourgeois in the recesses of small dark shops, selling humble necessaries that nobody seems to want. Sometimes a procession of richly vestured priests, and acolytes with candles and swinging censers, slowly traverses the empty ways. The silence is so deep you can almost hear it. Every vista is closed by pines, through the deep-green boughs and ruddy stems of which glows that glorious deep-blue sea under a sky of paler blue.