A few days after her decisive conversation with Raymond de Chelles,
Undine, emerging from the doors of the Nouveau Luxe, where she had been
to call on the newly-arrived Mrs. Homer Branney, once more found herself
face to face with Elmer Moffatt.
This time there was no mistaking his eagerness to be recognized. He
stopped short as they met, and she read such pleasure in his eyes that
she too stopped, holding out her hand.
"I'm glad you're going to speak to me," she said, and Moffatt reddened at
the allusion.
"Well, I very nearly didn't. I didn't know you. You look about as old as
you did when I first landed at Apex--remember?"
He turned back and began to walk at her side in the direction of the
Champs Elysees.
"Say--this is all right!" he exclaimed; and she saw that his glance had
left her and was ranging across the wide silvery square ahead of them to
the congregated domes and spires beyond the river.
"Do you like Paris?" she asked, wondering what theatres he had been to.
"It beats everything." He seemed to be breathing in deeply the
impression of fountains, sculpture, leafy' avenues and long-drawn
architectural distances fading into the afternoon haze.
"I suppose you've been to that old church over there?" he went on, his
gold-topped stick pointing toward the towers of Notre Dame.
"Oh, of course; when I used to sightsee. Have you never been to Paris
before?"
"No, this is my first look-round. I came across in March."
"In March?" she echoed inattentively. It never occurred to her that
other people's lives went on when they were out of her range of vision,
and she tried in vain to remember what she had last heard of Moffatt.
"Wasn't that a bad time to leave Wall Street?"
"Well, so-so. Fact is, I was played out: needed a change." Nothing in
his robust mien confirmed the statement, and he did not seem inclined to
develop it. "I presume you're settled here now?" he went on. "I saw by
the papers--"
"Yes," she interrupted; adding, after a moment: "It was all a mistake
from the first."
"Well, I never thought he was your form," said Moffatt.
His eyes had come back to her, and the look in them struck her as
something she might use to her advantage; but the next moment he had
glanced away with a furrowed brow, and she felt she had not wholly fixed
his attention.
"I live at the other end of Paris. Why not come back and have tea with
me?" she suggested, half moved by a desire to know more of his affairs,
and half by the thought that a talk with him might help to shed some
light on hers.
In the open taxi-cab he seemed to recover his sense of well-being, and
leaned back, his hands on the knob of his stick, with the air of a man
pleasantly aware of his privileges. "This Paris is a thundering good
place," he repeated once or twice as they rolled on through the crush
and glitter of the afternoon; and when they had descended at Undine's
door, and he stood in her drawing-room, and looked out on the
horse-chestnut trees rounding their green domes under the balcony, his
satisfaction culminated in the comment: "I guess this lays out West End
Avenue!"
His eyes met Undine's with their old twinkle, and their expression
encouraged her to murmur: "Of course there are times when I'm very
lonely."
She sat down behind the tea-table, and he stood at a little distance,
watching her pull off her gloves with a queer comic twitch of his
elastic mouth. "Well, I guess it's only when you want to be," he said,
grasping a lyre-backed chair by its gilt cords, and sitting down astride
of it, his light grey trousers stretching too tightly over his plump
thighs. Undine was perfectly aware that he was a vulgar over-dressed
man, with a red crease of fat above his collar and an impudent
swaggering eye; yet she liked to see him there, and was conscious that
he stirred the fibres of a self she had forgotten but had not ceased to
understand.
She had fancied her avowal of loneliness might call forth some
sentimental phrase; but though Moffatt was clearly pleased to be with
her she saw that she was not the centre of his thoughts, and the
discovery irritated her.
"I don't suppose YOU'VE known what it is to be lonely since you've been
in Europe?" she continued as she held out his tea-cup.
"Oh," he said jocosely, "I don't always go round with a guide"; and she
rejoined on the same note: "Then perhaps I shall see something of you."
"Why, there's nothing would suit me better; but the fact is, I'm
probably sailing next week."
"Oh, are you? I'm sorry." There was nothing feigned in her regret.
"Anything I can do for you across the pond?"