"I am very aged," said I—"almost forty-five." And I smiled a retrospective smile, watching the bubbles breaking in my wine-glass.
Memory began to work, deftly, among the debris of past years. I saw myself a student of eighteen, gayly promenading Paris with my tutor, living a monotonous colourless life in a city of which I knew nothing and saw nothing save through the windows of my English pension or in the featureless streets of the American quarter, under escort of my tutor and my asthmatic aunt, Miss Janet Van Twiller.
That year spent in Paris, to "acquire the language" in a house where nothing but English was spoken, had still a vague, tender charm for me, because in that year I was young. I grew older when I shook the tutor, side-stepped my aunt, and moved across the river.
Once, only once, had the placid serenity of that year been broken. It was one day—a day like this in spring—when, for some reason, even now utterly unknown to me, I deliberately walked out of the house alone in defiance of my tutor and my aunt, and wandered all day long through unknown squares and parks and streets intoxicated with my own freedom. And I remember, that day—which was the twin of this—sitting on the terrace of a tiny café in the Latin Quarter, I drifted into idle conversation with a demure little maid who was sipping a red syrup out of a tall thin glass.
Twenty-seven years ago! And here I was again, in the scented spring sunshine, with the same west wind whispering of youth and freedom, and my heart not a day older.
"My child," said I to the little maid, "twenty-seven years ago you drank pink strawberry syrup in a tall iced glass."
"I do not understand you, monsieur," she faltered.
"You cannot, mademoiselle. I am drinking to the memory of my dead youth."
And I touched my lips to the glass.
"I wonder," she said, under her breath, "what I am to do with the rest of the day?"