3
“You see,” Virginia began, as the car swallowed up the Champs Elysées towards the Ritz, “when I first went to see him, he patted me about here and there, and then he asked me the questions which even the nicest doctors must ask women. He didn’t seem any more satisfied with my answers than I am with the facts—for I do get so unnecessarily weak, sometimes, Ivor! And then he asked if I had ever had a motor accident or a fall from a horse, and I remembered a fall I had had in the second year of the war, over a ditch. Not a really bad fall, you know, but just bad enough to shake me up and keep me in bed for a day or two. And then, after the X-rays had been taken, he said I was a bit wrenched about inside—it’s all very technical, dear—and that he could fix it good and proper with an operation. Not a very serious operation, he said, but not so very minor either. So that’s why I must keep quiet until October—oh yes, I insisted on October, so that we can have our summer out!—for he’s afraid of ever so little a hæmorrhage or something. It would be very bad for me, he said, Ivor,” she added, in a funny little way.
“We must leave the Ritz at once,” Ivor firmly capped a silence.
“Please!” she agreed. “But where shall we go to, Ivor? I couldn’t bear one of those dazzling flats in the Avenue Victor Hugo or round about the Parc Monceau, even if we could find one; and the Latin Quarter is now an annexe of New York—where can we go, Ivor?”
The car swung round the vast Place de la Concorde....
4
He thought and acted to such good advantage that—with the help of wires to Turner to hunt up old addresses—within twenty-four hours he had routed up Kay Benson in his studio on the Butte. Ivor had known Kay Benson in the feverish months of new acquaintance succeeding on his meeting with Otto and Fitz in 1910: had lent him money—which Kay had repaid—and had never entirely lost touch with him. Now Ivor liked the studio at sight, dirty and unkempt as it was; for Kay Benson, having built and decorated it in a suddenly rich period before the war, had since fallen from that high estate, and was become again the impoverished and earnest Kay of old. His absence during the war had not improved the general ensemble of the place—but still, thought Ivor, a few days, a few stuffs, a little furniture, and Virginia would put it splendidly right. And the garden over Paris was a marvellous accident, a miracle to happen to a lover....
Kay Benson was eager—the poorer he was the more eager he was about everything, poor Kay!—to go to Tripoli: “and leave this bloody Europe for good and all,” he said furiously. So the matter of letting the studio to Ivor, from that very day if Ivor liked, was easily arranged.
But when Virginia saw it in the candle-light of that same night—Kay was adventuring, earnestly of course, and had given Ivor the key—she cried out that she simply must have it for her own: it was so divine with its wide yet dim roominess, its little stairs up to a little gallery at the end, and its little rooms leading from the little gallery.