She said: "Am I really as bad as that, Tony?"
"You are," said I.
She shook her head. "No," she replied, after a pause. "In the depths of myself I'm as conventional as you are. That's why I said I was puzzled to know why I had never fallen in love with any one of you. I had my deep reasons, my dear Tony, for saying it. I'm bound to my type and my order. God knows I've seen enough and know enough to be free. But I'm not. Last night showed me that I'm not."
"And that's final, my dear?" said I.
She helped herself to salad with an air of bravura. She helped herself, to my surprise, to a prodigious amount of salad.
"As final as death," she replied.
There had been billed about the place a Grand Concert du Soir in the Casino de Royat. The celebrated tenor, M. Horatio Bakkus. The Casino having been burned down in 1918, the concerts took place under the bandstand in the park.
After dinner we found places, among the multitude, on the Casino Cafe Terrace overlooking the bandstand, and listened to Bakkus sing. I explained Bakkus, more or less, to Auriol. Although she could not accept Lackaday as Petit Patou, she seemed to accept Bakkus, without question, as a professional singer. The concert over, he joined us at our little japanned iron table, and acknowledged her well-merited compliments--I tell you, he sang like a minor Canon in an angelic choir--with, well, with the well-bred air of a minor Canon in an angelic choir. With easy grace he dismissed himself and talked knowledgeably and informatively of the antiquities and the beauties of Auvergne. To most English folk it was an undiscovered country. We must steal a car and visit Orcival. Hadn't I heard of it? France's gem of Romanesque churches? And the Château--ages old---with its charmille--the towering maze-like walks of trees kept clipped in scrupulous formality by an old gardener during the war--the charmille designed by no less a genius than Le Nôtre, who planned the wonders of Versailles and the exquisite miniature of the garden of Nîmes? To-morrow must we go.
This white-haired, luminous-eyed ascetic--he drank but an orangeade through post-war straws--had kept us spellbound with his talk. I glanced at Auriol and read compliance in her eye.