And then she had laughed again and kissed her finger-tips to him, and driven away wrapped up in her shining furs, and he was conscious of a stinging sense of excitement, annoyance, pleasure, and confusion, as if he had drunk some irritant and heady wine.
He had gone on to his clubs with an uneasy sense of something perilous and distasteful having come into his life, yet also with a consciousness of a certain zest added to the reductions of this his favourite city. He did not go to the Hôtel Brancka in the next hour, and was sensible of having to exercise a certain control over himself to refrain from doing so.
'Did you know that Olga was in Paris?' she said, in some surprise, to him when they met in the evening.
'I believe she arrived this morning,' he answered, with a certain effort. 'I met her an hour or two ago. She came unexpectedly; she had not even told her servants to open her hotel.'
'Is Stefan with her?'
'I believe not.'
'But surely it is her term of waiting in Vienna?'
He gave a gesture of indifference.
'I believed it was. I think it was. She will be sure to write to you this evening, so she said. We cannot escape her, you see; she is our fate.'
'We can go back to Hohenszalras.'