Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Europe -- Fiction; Love stories; Marriage -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction; Socialites -- Fiction
As he took leave it occurred to him to ask where Susy was living. At
least he imagined that it had just occurred to him, and that he was
making the enquiry merely as a measure of precaution, in order to know
what quarter of Paris to avoid; but in reality the question had been on
his lips since he had first entered the office, and lurking in his mind
since he had emerged from the railway station that morning. The fact
of not knowing where she lived made the whole of Paris a meaningless
unintelligible place, as useless to him as the face of a huge clock that
has lost its hour hand.
The address in Passy surprised him: he had imagined that she would be
somewhere in the neighborhood of the Champs Elysees or the Place de
l’Etoile. But probably either Mrs. Melrose or Ellie Vanderlyn had taken
a house at Passy. Well--it was something of a relief to know that she
was so far off. No business called him to that almost suburban region
beyond the Trocadero, and there was much less chance of meeting her than
if she had been in the centre of Paris.
All day he wandered, avoiding the fashionable quarters, the streets
in which private motors glittered five deep, and furred and feathered
silhouettes glided from them into tea-rooms, picture-galleries and
jewellers’ shops. In some such scenes Susy was no doubt figuring:
slenderer, finer, vivider, than the other images of clay, but imitating
their gestures, chattering their jargon, winding her hand among the same
pearls and sables. He struck away across the Seine, along the quays
to the Cite, the net-work of old Paris, the great grey vaults of St.
Eustache, the swarming streets of the Marais. He gazed at monuments
dawdled before shop-windows, sat in squares and on quays, watching
people bargain, argue, philander, quarrel, work-girls stroll past in
linked bands, beggars whine on the bridges, derelicts doze in the pale
winter sun, mothers in mourning hasten by taking children to school, and
street-walkers beat their weary rounds before the cafes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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