VIII
November
To-day I saw my brother, Alan, after six years. Through a chance meeting, I found him living in the Luxemburg quarter. A girl answered my knock. We stood confronting each other, mutually surprised. I remembered her among the restless habitués of the Abbé de Thelême and the Café de Paris, in the old days. The paint and artifice were gone. She stood there, dark-eyed, frail, olive-tinted, considering me suspiciously, her woman’s instinct warned of possible danger to the thing she sheltered from the world.
“Tiens; it’s you, Toinon!”
She started forward and looked at me intently, but in her multitudinous conception of man, my face was but a blur in the panorama.
“It’s me you want to see—what’s your business?”
“Does Mr. Alan Littledale live here?”
“And if he does?”
“I am his brother.”
Instantly her manner changed.