I did it my way, and cut my finger.
“The devil’s in the knife!” I cried. “But that’s the right way.”
Judith said nothing, but bound up my wound, and, like the well-conducted person of the ballad, went on cutting bread-and-butter. Her smile, however, was provoking.
“And all this time,” I said, half an hour later, “you haven’t told me where you are going.”
“Paris. To stay with Delphine Carrere.”
“I thought you said you wanted solitude.”
I have met Delphine Carrere—brave femme if ever there was one, and the loyalest soul in the world, the only one of Judith’s early women friends who has totally ignored the fact of the Sacred Cap of Good Repute having been thrown over the windmills (indeed who knows whether dear, golden-hearted Delphine herself could conscientiously write the magic initials S.C.G.R. after her name?); but Delphine has never struck me as a person in whose dwelling one could find conventual seclusion. Judith, however, explained.
“Delphine will be painting all day, and dissipating all night. I can’t possibly disturb her in her studio, for she has to work tremendously hard—and I’m decidedly not going to dissipate with her. So I shall have my days and nights to my sequestered and meditative self.”
I said nothing: but all the same I am tolerably certain that Judith, being Judith, will enjoy prodigious merrymaking in Paris. She is absolutely sincere in her intentions—the earth holds no sincerer woman—but she is a self-deceiver. Her about-to-be-sequestered and meditative self was at that moment sitting on the arm of a chair and smoking a cigarette, with undisguised relish of the good things of this life. The blue smoke wreathing itself amid her fair hair resembled, so I told her in the relaxed intellectual frame of mind of the contented man, incense mounting through the nimbus of a saint. She affected solicitude lest the life-blood of my intelligence should be pouring out through my cut finger. No, I am convinced that the recueillement (that beautiful French word for which we have no English equivalent, meaning the gathering of the soul together within itself) of the rue Boissy d’Anglais is the very happiest delusion wherewith Judith has hitherto deluded herself. I am glad, exceedingly glad. Her temperament—I have got reconciled to her affliction—craves the gaiety which London denies her.
“And when are you going?” I asked.