Chapter 6 - Page 2

quiet and safe, smoothed out the creases of
his spirit. She dropped her own experiments and gave him immortal
things, and he lounged there, pacified and charmed, feeling the mean
little room grow large and vague and happy possibilities come back.
Abruptly, at the piano, she called out to him: "Those papers of
yours--the letters you found--are not in the house?"

"No, they're not in the house."

"I was sure of it! No matter--it's all right!" she added. She
herself was pacified--trouble was a false note. Later he was on the
point of asking her how she knew the objects she had mentioned were
not in the house; but he let it pass. The subject was a profitless
riddle--a puzzle that grew grotesquely bigger, like some monstrosity
seen in the darkness, as one opened one's eyes to it. He closed his
eyes--he wanted another vision. Besides, she had shown him that she
had extraordinary senses--her explanation would have been stranger
than the fact. Moreover they had other things to talk about, in
particular the question of her putting off her return to Dover till
the morrow and dispensing meanwhile with the valuable protection of
Sidney. This was indeed but another face of the question of her
dining with him somewhere that evening (where else should she dine?)-
-accompanying him, for instance, just for an hour of Bohemia, in
their deadly respectable lives, to a jolly little place in Soho.
Mrs. Ryves declined to have her life abused, but in fact, at the
proper moment, at the jolly little place, to which she did accompany
him--it dealt in macaroni and Chianti--the pair put their elbows on
the crumpled cloth and, face to face, with their little emptied
coffee-cups pushed away and the young man's cigarette lighted by her
command, became increasingly confidential. They went afterwards to
the theatre, in cheap places, and came home in "busses" and under
umbrellas.

On the way back Peter Baron turned something over in his mind as he
had never turned anything before; it was the question of whether, at
the end, she would let him come into her sitting-room for five
minutes. He felt on this point a passion of suspense and impatience,
and yet for what would it be but to tell her how poor he was? This
was literally the moment to say it, so supremely depleted had the
hour of Bohemia left him. Even Bohemia was too expensive, and yet in
the course of the day his whole temper on the subject of certain
fitnesses had changed. At Jersey Villas (it was near midnight, and
Mrs. Ryves, scratching a light for her glimmering taper, had said:
"Oh, yes, come in for a minute if you like!"), in her precarious
parlour, which was indeed, after the brilliances of the evening, a