“You are so vain, so vain, ...” she whispered.
CHAPTER XI
1
Naturally, they did not now hurry to Paris: or hurry anywhither, for the matter of that. They had no plans, there was no hurry, the weather was perfect; and the world was far too busy enjoying the lack of killing—the spring of 1919!—to notice or care what two people were doing. Ivor and Virginia had too much to talk about to discuss such banalities as destinations. “We are going towards Paris? Very well then, let’s go towards Paris.” Thus they motored gently towards Paris, staying at places. Nach Paris is the vaguest and most uncertain destiny in history, as all men know; and the route these two adventurers took would have broken the heart of a motoring-map, if they had consulted one. They somehow got to Chartres, among other places. Chartres has about as much relation to Paris from Avignon as Canterbury, and they got to it only by the divine accident of seeing, one evening, the two towers of its magnificent cathedral from the far distance. Ivor and Virginia never forgot the catch in their hearts at the sudden beauty of the great cathedral high against the evening sky. “Oh, it’s somehow like a great horse!” Virginia whispered in the silence of their wonder at that great shape high against the sky: for the cathedral of Chartres is built upon an eminence in the town, and from anywhere on the straight roads that lead out of Chartres to the four corners of the world you will see its lofty genius against the sky.... From Chartres to Paris is but a three hours’ drive at most, but it took them a week: part of which time they spent at a hotel in the forest of Fontainbleau. A lovely and indescribable fortnight, this from Avignon to Paris....
2
Virginia always stayed at the Ritz in Paris: it was just a habit: but the habit was confined to the rue Cambon side of it, saying it was quieter there. Ivor, who also stayed on the rue Cambon side, pointed out that as a matter of fact it was much noisier than the Place Vendôme side, but that as all hotels were beastly, it didn’t very much matter. There are certain gentlemen of mean and truculent appearance, who, in the early hours of every morning, enter the central streets of Paris, and bang large tin cans against the walls on the thin pretence of clearing out the dustbins.
Virginia had found a letter awaiting her at the bureau: and she had looked at the envelope with that vague, far-away look. But when Ivor, dressed for dinner, came into her room to see if she was ready, which of course she was not, she gave him the letter with a mischievous laugh: saying that it was a masterpiece of Tarlyonry, and an instructive essay for any man on the perfect way to treat a vanished wife and a possibly vanishing income. “Which, though, he wouldn’t think very much about,” she conceded, “for no Tarlyon was ever quite penniless.”
“Am I, or am I not, going to like this letter?” Ivor asked her frankly. “Because if not, I would much rather read it after dinner, if I’ve got to read it at all....”
Virginia was before her mirror, subduing “Swan and Edgar”; and she turned to him in her chair, with her face sideways, holding that small iron toy to Swan. She made a little face at him.
“It’s just an ordinary kind of letter,” she said.