"What will you say to me, when I take you away from all this,—when we have to go back to Barcelona?"
"But I shall go with you?" The blue eyes were searching his face, and there was fear as well as a question in them.
"Do you suppose I shall leave you here alone, child?" He hated himself for the evasive answer.
He turned her thoughts to other things, bidding her talk of those days they had spent together in Paris. She had named it Paradise, and to her it had been indeed a place of enchantment, for she saw it for the first time, and Vladimir was always with her.
She had seen its treasures of art, and abandoned herself to its glamour with the enthusiasm and the freshness of a child.
She had looked out of place in the artificial atmosphere of the boulevards, among the gas-lit cafés, dazzling shop-windows, flâneurs and gaily dressed women. A man who wrote poetry, and starved on what he received for his verses in the Quartier Latin, had stood beside her for a few moments in the Rue de Rivoli, and had gone home to his garret inspired to produce some lines in which he compared her to the delicate narcissus blooms that died so quickly in the flower sellers' baskets.
Together she and Vladimir had strolled among the wonders of the Louvre, he critical and unmoved, but indulgent and gratified at her pleasure as at the pleasure of a child.
Pauline had never been able to express what she felt. She could only worship dumbly before the changeless unfading beauty of these relics of the fairy-cities, of Athens, and Rome, and Alexandria. She had loved the Greek marbles best. The weird shapes in the Corridor of Pan, the glorious torso of the Venus Accroupie with the two deep lines in her side that make her more human and alive than any other Venus, more divine even than the Milo, faultless in her "serpentining beauty rounds on rounds," serene and gracious in the shadow of her crimson-hung alcove.
And Vladimir was wise, for he allowed her to dream, and did not show her more than he could help of modern Paris.
From there they had gone to Brussels, then to Vienna, and last, and most beautiful of all, Buda-Pesth, the city among the hills. They had seen it first of all as Buda-Pesth should be seen, at night, hanging between earth and sky, and with her million lights sparkling against the soft darkness of the surrounding hills. Pauline's eyes had never become satiated with the sight of beautiful things.