“I suppose she knows all about Bertha,” he thought. Kreisler-like, he looked towards the Lipmann women. “Homme sensuel! Homme égoïste!”
She seemed rather shy with him.
“How do you like Paris?” he asked her.
“I don’t know yet. Do you like it?” She had a flatness in speaking English because of her education in the United States.
“I don’t like to be quite so near the centre of the world. You can see all the machinery working. It makes you a natural sceptic. But here I am. I find it difficult to live in London.”
“I should have thought everything was so perfected here that the machinery did not obtrude⸺”
“I don’t feel that. I think that a place like this exists for the rest of the world. It works that the other countries may live and create. That is the rôle France has chosen. The French spirit seems to me rather spare and impoverished at present.”
“You regard it as a mother-drudge?”
“More of a drudge than a mother. We don’t get much really from France, except tidiness.”