"Let me give you a lift. Come on."
Cornelius Rysbroek saw her lovely head turning away from him, the swirl of her cloak as she ascended the steps, the flash of her tapering boot heel. He then stood looking round him through his ironical, weary mask, one hand on the back of a chair, however, as if without that support his quaking legs might let him fall to the floor.
CHAPTER XLII
The limousine glided northward. A cold rain was falling. Behind the glistening windowpanes the scene was continually melting from one lackness into another. At each flash of radiance
Madame Zanidov was revealed motionless in her corner, muffled in her cloak, with closed eyes.
"Is she reading my thoughts?" Lilla wondered.
No matter: by this time the whole world must know them, released as they had been, into that eager public air, like a deafening cry of confession. "What's to be the end of this?" she asked herself, appalled, as she felt her life being whirled along from one fatal impulse to another, just as she was being whisked by the limousine from darkness to darkness. To check that inexorable progress! to see some constant light!
Anna Zanidov turned her wedge-shaped face toward Lilla, with the words:
"I have thought of you many times."
"I can say the same."