"Now you must go to sleep," he said.
He went out. Irene felt stifled. She opened the window. The night was green and bitter as an apple. The street shone emptily. Only a red light glowed like some mysterious fire grate: the rear lamp of a car. With a feeling of uneasiness Irene went back into her room, put out the light and leant on the window sill once more.
A few moments later the house door opened and a man came out. There was no doubt about it; it was Lewis. He went towards the car standing a little way down the street. Then he stopped and looked up. Reassured, he opened the door of the car. Beneath the electric street lamp Irene saw Madame Magnac's hand, limp and white, as if it had Been severed. The car drove away.
[XIV]
"HAVEN'T you ever played tricks on those you love," thought Lewis, answering an imaginary antagonist, as he walked along the quais by himself. The night, deep as coffee grounds in which he could foretell no future, was over. He had spent it with Madame Magnac, as in the old days. Now he was on his way back to Irene for breakfast. What he liked about Irene was her purity; he had adored that purity for so long that he could not bear it any more. Indeed it protected Irene, unfairly he thought, from everything; it protected her from suspicion, from danger; it enabled her to remain herself; never to make an effort to serve him or to understand him; she went to bed completely enveloped in this carapace.... To go on living in Paris after the age of thirty one must accept being surrounded by complicity. Otherwise one must leave. Since Irene had agreed to come back to France, she must sooner or later get used to it.
Lewis used to think that the peccadillos which seemed to him necessary with women who only attracted him physically, would automatically cease if he ever really fell in love. He had counted without that eagerness to surpass ourselves which dominates us and which is perhaps nothing but habit disguised.
No, he was not complicating his life, he was simplifying it.
[XV]
HE was simplifying it more than he imagined, for when he got home he found the house empty. He waited for two days. Then seized with a remorse and despair of which he would not have been thought capable, in forty-two hours he scoured Paris, London and Trieste. But without result. There was not the slightest trace of Irene.
On the eighth day he received a telegram from her asking him to come and join her at Corfu.