"You've done me a great honor in telling me this. I understand. You want the earth, or as much of it as you can get, and when you've got it and found out what it means, you'll make a great use of it. Have you many friends?"
"No," said Zora. He had an uncanny way of throwing her back on to essentials. "None stronger than myself."
"Will you take me as a friend? I'm strong enough," said Sypher.
"Willingly," she said, dominated by his earnestness.
"That's good. I may be able to help you when you've found your vocation. I can tell you, at any rate, how to get to what you want. You've just got to keep a thing in view and go for it and never let your eyes wander to right or left or up or down. And looking back is fatal—the truest thing in Scripture is about Lot's wife. She looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt."
He paused, his face assumed an air of profound reflection, and he added with gravity:
"And the Clem Sypher of the period when he came by, made use of her, and plastered her over with posters of his cure."
The day she had appointed as the end of her Monte Carlo visit arrived. She would first go to Paris, where some Americans whom she had met in Florence and with whom she had exchanged occasional postcards pressed her to join them. Then London; and then a spell of rest in the lavender of Nunsmere. That was her programme. Septimus Dix was to escort her as far as Paris, in defiance of the proprieties as interpreted by Turner. What was to become of him afterwards neither conjectured; least of all Septimus himself. He said nothing about getting back to Shepherd's Bush. Many brilliant ideas had occurred to him during his absence which needed careful working out. Wherefore Zora concluded that he proposed to accompany her to London.
A couple of hours before the train started she dispatched Turner to Septimus's hotel to remind him of the journey. Turner, a strong-minded woman of forty—like the oyster she had been crossed in love and like her mistress she held men in high contempt—returned with an indignant tale. After a series of parleyings with Mr. Dix through the medium of the hotel chasseur, who had a confused comprehension of voluble English, she had mounted at Mr. Dix's entreaty to his room. There she found him, half clad and in his dressing-gown, staring helplessly at a wilderness of clothing and toilet articles for which there was no space in his suit cases and bag, already piled mountain high.