‘Well, what did you think of Miss Seymour?’ inquired Puddle, when Stephen got back about twenty minutes later.
Stephen hesitated: ‘I’m not perfectly certain. She was very friendly, but I couldn’t help feeling that she liked me because she thought me—oh, well, because she thought me what I am, Puddle. But I may have been wrong—she was awfully friendly. Brockett was at his very worst though, poor devil! His environment seemed to go to his head.’ She sank down wearily on to a chair: ‘Oh, Puddle, Puddle, it’s a hell of a business.’
Puddle nodded.
Then Stephen said rather abruptly: ‘All the same, we’re going to live here in Paris. We’re going to look at a house to-morrow, an old house with a garden in the Rue Jacob.’
For a moment Puddle hesitated, then she said: ‘There’s only one thing against it. Do you think you’ll ever be happy in a city? You’re so fond of the life that belongs to the country.’
Stephen shook her head: ‘That’s all past now, my dear; there’s no country for me away from Morton. But in Paris I might make some sort of a home, I could work here—and then of course there are people. . . .’
Something started to hammer in Puddle’s brain: ‘Like to like! Like to like! Like to like!’ it hammered.
CHAPTER 32
1
Stephen bought the house in the Rue Jacob, because as she walked through the dim, grey archway that led from the street to the cobbled courtyard, and saw the deserted house standing before her, she knew at once that there she would live. This will happen sometimes, we instinctively feel in sympathy with certain dwellings.