“To this house?”
“Of course I am living in this house as before, and with your friend Chitta. You know that I could not have lived anywhere else in Paris. I couldn’t. So I took the old room—the dear little old room—again.”
“Before you knew that I still loved you!” She hung her head. “But I’ll surely never let you go this time.” He held her hands fast as if fearing that she might escape him. “No custom—no law—no force could take you now. Tell me: would you have wanted to go back?”
She freed herself. That newer perfume filled the purple twilight: the pure perfume of the Azure Rose that the wandering Basque carries with him abroad to bring him safely home. She drew the rose from beneath her blouse and held it out to him. Cartaret kissed it. She took it back, kissed it too, went to the nearest window and, tearing the flower petal from petal, dropped it into the Paris street.
“No,” she said softly when she had turned to him again, “do not kiss me yet. I want you first to understand me. I do love my own country, but I cannot stay in it forever. I was being smothered there by all the dust of those dead centuries; I was being slowly crushed by the iron weight of their old customs and their old laws—all horribly alive when they should have been long ago in their graves. There was nothing around me that was not old: old walls and towers, ancient tapestries and arms, musty rooms, yellowed manuscripts. The age of the place, it seemed to become a soul-in-itself. It seemed to get a consciousness and to hate me because I was not as it was. There was nothing that was not old—and I was young.” As she remembered it, her face grew almost sulky. “Even if it had not been for you, I believe I should have come away again. I was so angry at it all that I could even have put on a Paquin gown—if I had had a Paquin gown!—and worn it at dinner in the big dining-hall of my ancestors.”
He understood. He realized—none better—the hunger and thirst for Paris: for the lights of the boulevards, the clatter of the dominoes on the café-tables, the procession of carriages and motors along the Champs Élysées, the very cries and hurry of the rue St. Honoré by day or the Boul’ Miche’ by night. Nevertheless, he had lately been an American headed for America, and so he said:
“Just wait till you see Broadway!”
Vitoria smiled, but she remained serious.
“I wanted you to know that—first,” she said: “to know that I came away this second time in large part because of you, but not wholly.”
“I think,” said Cartaret, “that I can manage to forgive that.”