* * * * * *
Eric went to Paris the day following. He had no idea, when he left, whether he would try to persuade Connie to come back to London or not. He would decide that when he had seen her. Nor did he explain matters to Louise, to whom the very name of his once beautiful sister was anathema. He sent her a wire, however, which said merely, “Called out of town for few days. Probably back Monday.”
He had been working very hard, and welcomed a change of scene. He had not been out of England since serving with his regiment in France, and later in Italy, from which campaign he was invalided home shortly before the Armistice. He was now member for a London borough, having given up soldiering for politics. His rather disconcerting honesty and policy of no compromise won him more friends in the former calling than in the latter, and though he had enthusiastic friends he had equally whole-hearted enemies, among whom he began to fear he must number his wife.
The thought of a lifelong companionship with a woman who disliked, or seemed to dislike his every attribute, appalled him. He had a way of reducing problems to their simplest form, and being a clear thinker, saw facts in all their nakedness. Louise was his wife. He had tried to make her happy. She either liked him or she did not. If she did not like him, why live with him? And if she did like him, why not show that she did? It came to that. Other women liked him. Why could not his wife? He had never tried to please any other woman as he had tried to please her. The thing was an enigma. They could have had such delightful times together, for they had everything—health, youth, money, friends. Her coldness was inexplicable. She was not only cold to him, but to all men, and to most women. If she had cared for any one else he would have found a way to release her. He tried to put it out of his mind on the journey to Paris, and thought instead of Connie. He had been so proud of her beauty in the old days. He remembered her at dances, surrounded by respectfully admiring young men. How she had queened it for a while! And then—Petrovitch!
From Calais he shared a compartment with a rather charming woman with whom he fell easily into talk. He had a gift of nonsense which, when he cared to use it, most people—his wife of course excepted—found irresistible. So they sparred pleasantly till the train neared Paris. But in the end she struck a too personal note, talking about herself and her affairs with an astonishing lack of reserve, whereupon he liked her less. When they separated she gave him her address, but he forgot both it and her. She never forgot him. If he had liked her more they would have parted friends, or on the way to friendship, which would have annoyed Louise, who only made friends with people she had known or known of for years. But her candor was without simplicity, and her impulsiveness not without calculation, so she passed out of his life, for he was fastidious about women.
[CHAPTER VIII]
Eric drove at once to the little hotel off the Avenue de la Grande Armée, and made himself known. He had wired for a room at the Crillon, preferring not to stay too near Connie lest he should find her surrounded by sympathetic friends. He dreaded her friends.
The granddaughter of old Madame Peritôt, a pleasant-faced woman named Le Blanc, gave him a cordial welcome, asked immediately after Madame Claire and then told him in answer to his question that Madame la Comtesse was resting, but would undoubtedly see her brother. Who indeed, she thought, would not be glad to see such a brother—a brother with such delightful manners, whose blue eyes—Ciel! Madame Le Blanc was enchanted by the blueness of his eyes.
Eric waited in the little salon, remembering incidents of their extremely happy childhood. Madame Claire had so often brought the three of them there, during vacations. They had nearly always come to Paris en route for the coast of Brittany or Normandy when the Roman summers became unbearable. He remembered how he and Connie, an exquisite, long-legged child of fifteen, had knocked over and broken a Dresden group during a scrimmage. They had secretly substituted for it another almost exactly like the first, except that the dress of the shepherdess which had been blue with pink flowers, was now pink with blue flowers. There it stood, just where their guilty hands had placed it, so many years ago, and he could not resist taking it off the mantelpiece and examining it. It was one of old Madame Peritôt’s most prized possessions, and how they laughed when they realized that she had never noticed the difference! It might easily have met the fate just then of its unlucky predecessor, for he nearly dropped it, so suddenly and quietly did Connie enter—and such a Connie!