At moments she felt enraged.
She saw the crowds passing in the streets, women tripping along consciously, men—flaneurs—strolling with their well-known look of watchful idleness, and she felt herself to be one of life’s prisoners. And she knew she would never again take hands with the Paris she had once known so well. Why was that? Because of something in herself, something irrevocable which had fixed itself in her with the years. She was changing, had changed, not merely in body, but in something else. She felt that her audacity was sinking under the influence of her diffidence. Suddenly it occurred to her that perhaps this sudden visit to Paris on the track of an adventure was the last strong effort of her audacity. How would it end? In a meek and ridiculous return to London after a lunch with Caroline Briggs, a dinner with Caroline, a visit to the Opera Comique with Caroline! That really seemed the probable conclusion of the whole business. And yet—and yet she still had a sort of queer under feeling that she was drawing near to a climax in her life, and that, when she did return to London, she would return a definitely changed woman.
At half-past eight that night she walked into Caroline’s wonderful house in the Champs-Elysees.
During dinner the two women talked as any two women of their types might have talked, quite noncommittally, although, in a surface way, quite intimately. Miss Briggs was a creature full of tact, and was the last person in the world to try to force a confidence from anyone. She was also not given at any time to pouring out confidences of her own.
After dinner they sat in a little room which Miss Briggs had had conveyed from Persia to Paris. Everything in it was Persian. When the door by which it was entered had been shut there was absolutely nothing to suggest Europe to those within. A faint Eastern perfume pervaded this strange little room, which suggested a deep retirement, an almost cloistered seclusion. A grille in one of the walls drew the imagination towards the harem. It seemed that there must be hidden women over there beyond it. Instinctively one listened for the tinkle of childish laughter, for the distant plash of a fountain, for the shuffle of slippers on marble.
Lady Sellingworth admired this room, and envied her friend for possessing it. But that night it brought to her a thought which she could not help expressing.
“Aren’t you terribly lonely in this house, Caroline?” she said. “It is so large and so wonderful that I should think it must make solitude almost a bodily shape to you. And this room seems to be in the very heart of the house. Do you ever sit here without a friend or guest?”
“Now and then, but not often at night,” said Miss Briggs, with serene self-possession.
“You are an extraordinary woman!” said Lady Sellingworth.
“Extraordinary! Why?”