This time if he wanted French he had it—off the ice.
"Touché—et merci, Monsieur. Bonjour."
I bowed, stepped forward, and placed myself between him and Jennie. I touched her elbow.
"I saw you come in. Are you nearly ready? We shall be late."
I was the angrier that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry. Jennie, giving me only the tail of her glance, turned to her choice of a bathing-cap again—the yellow one or the green one. My back was towards Rose, but I heard a saleswoman step up to him.
"Rien, merci—j'attends M'sieur," he said.
Jennie too heard, and turned.
There was no atmosphere of soft and factitious half-illumination now. This was the full blaze of a perfect August midday, that flooded the shop with sunshine and made a dazzle of Jennie's little white hat with the cord about it, of the burnished hair beneath. The sleeves of her white frock were cut short above the dimple of her elbow, the tiny blue ribbon across her shoulders peeped through. She in her sunny white, he in black vareuse and corduroys brown as a wintry coppice, again stood looking one at the other.
And for the second time within the course of a sun I saw the world begin anew, as it begins anew for some he, for some she, with every moment that passes. For the beginning of the cradle is not the real beginning. That is only the end of the darkness of forebeing that is pierced with a woman's pang. That is still an uneasy slumber, yea, even though it weakly smile, and by and by stumble over its syllables, and stumble over its own uncertain feet, and walk, and spell, and use a tennis-racket. It is incomplete, and will never be complete in itself. It is completed in that moment when its eyes open on other eyes, and the wonder kindles there, and the ground underfoot is forgotten, and the surrounding sunlight is forgotten, and nothing is remembered except that those eyes have found their other-own eyes, and, though they lose them again in that same instant, never to see them again, will remember them in the hour when the shadow closes over all. That, that re-begins the cycle, is our real beginning. It was that which, in that tawdry Bazaar, turned the golden sunlight to a nimbus about us.
Again I touched her.