“Why don’t you run over to Paris some week-end? After all, it’s only seven hours from London: if you left here in the morning you’d be there in time for dinner. It would be a good change for you. I should think a little trip like that would buck you up tremendously.”
Her words gave him a wonderful feeling of confidence and hope: she had travelled a great deal, and she had the casual, assured way of speaking of a voyage that made it seem very easy and filled one with a sense of joy and adventure when she spoke about it. When Eugene tried to think of Paris by himself it had seemed very far away and hard to reach: London stood between it and him, and when he thought of the huge smoky web of London, the soft grey skies above him, and the enormous weight of lives that were hidden somewhere in that impenetrable fog, a grey desolation and weariness of the spirit filled him. It seemed to him that he must draw each breath of that soft grey air with heavy weary effort, and that every mile of his journey would be a ghastly struggle through some viscous and material substance, that weighted down his steps and filled his heart with desolation.
But when Mrs. Coulson spoke to him about it, suddenly it all seemed wonderfully easy and good. England was magically small, the Channel to be taken in a stride, and all the thrill, the joy, the mystery of Paris his again—the moment that he chose to make it his.
He looked at her gaunt weathered face, the hard bright armour of her eyes, and wondered how anything so clear, so sharp, so crisp, and so incisive could have been shaped and grown underneath these soft and humid skies that numbed him, mind and heart and body, with their thick dull substance of grey weariness and desolation.
A day or two before he left, Edith came into his room one afternoon bearing a tray with tea and jam and buttered bread. He was sitting in his chair before the fire, and had his coat off: when she came in he scrambled to his feet, reached for the coat and started to put it on. In her young crisp voice she told him not to, and put the tray down on the table, saying that the maid was having her afternoon off.
Then for a moment she stood looking at him with her faint and enigmatic smile.
“So you’re leaving us?” she said presently.
“Yes. Tomorrow.”
“And where will you go from here?” she said.
“To Germany, I think. Just for a short time—two or three weeks.”
