“You’ll go back to Joyce. That’s best for you. She’s the Beatrice of your Divina Commedia.”
He didn’t dispute that. It was the truth, as far as he knew it in his own heart.
“At least our friendship is eternal,” he said in a low voice.
“Absence is the ditch of forgetfulness,” she said lightly, and then quoted a French verse he had heard before, in war-time, when a French girl had sung it in an old inn at Cassel, on the way to Ypres.
“Partir, c’est mourir un peu,
C’est mourir à ce qu’on aime.”
Before he went away, he asked her a question in which she understood a subtle meaning.
“About Christy, what shall I say to him?”
Janet laughed, with a touch of extra colour in her cheeks.
“Tell him he needn’t have gone as far as Moscow. The Superfluous Woman is a stay-at-home, and very happy with her blind boys.”