Americans -- France -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; France -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
He was looking at her, and she tried to return his look, but her eyes
were blind with tears, and in dread of his seeing them she got up and
walked away. He did not follow her, and she stood with her back to him,
staring at a bowl of carnations on a little table strewn with books. Her
tears magnified everything she looked at, and the streaked petals of the
carnations, their fringed edges and frail curled stamens, pressed upon
her, huge and vivid. She noticed among the books a volume of verse he
had sent her from England, and tried to remember whether it was before
or after...
She felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and at last she turned to
him. “I shall see you to-morrow before you go...”
He made no answer.
She moved toward the door and he held it open for her. She saw his hand
on the door, and his seal ring in its setting of twisted silver; and the
sense of the end of all things came to her.
They walked down the drawing-rooms, between the shadowy reflections of
screens and cabinets, and mounted the stairs side by side. At the end of
the gallery, a lamp brought out turbid gleams in the smoky battle-piece
above it.
On the landing Darrow stopped; his room was the nearest to the stairs.
“Good night,” he said, holding out his hand.
As Anna gave him hers the springs of grief broke loose in her. She
struggled with her sobs, and subdued them; but her breath came unevenly,
and to hide her agitation she leaned on him and pressed her face against
his arm.
“Don’t--don’t,” he whispered, soothing her.
Her troubled breathing sounded loudly in the silence of the sleeping
house. She pressed her lips tight, but could not stop the nervous
pulsations in her throat, and he put an arm about her and, opening his
door, drew her across the threshold of his room. The door shut
behind her and she sat down on the lounge at the foot of the bed. The
pulsations in her throat had ceased, but she knew they would begin again
if she tried to speak.
Darrow walked away and leaned against the mantelpiece. The red-veiled
lamp shone on his books and papers, on the arm-chair by the fire, and
the scattered objects on his dressing-table. A log glimmered on the
hearth, and the room was warm and faintly smoke-scented. It was the
first time she had ever been in a room he lived in, among his personal
possessions and the traces of his daily usage. Every object about her
seemed to contain a particle of himself: the whole air breathed of him,
steeping her in the sense of his intimate presence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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