side of man’s dark heart, the buried loveliness that all men long for.
LXXXIII
The car which they had chartered for a four months’tour was brought round from a garage at nine o’clock. A few minutes later they were on their way to Rheims.
Elinor drove; Eugene sat beside her; Ann and Starwick were in the rear seat. The car was a good one—a Panhard—and Elinor drove swiftly, beautifully, with magnificent competence, as she did all things, getting ahead of everybody else, besting even the swerve of the taxi-drivers in their wasp-like flight, and doing it all with such smooth ease that no one noticed it.
They seemed to get through the great dense web, the monumental complication of central Paris by a kind of magic. As always, Elinor communicated to everyone and everything the superb confidence of her authority. In her presence, and under her governance, the strange and alien world about them became instantly familiar as the Main Street of one’s native town, making even the bewildering and intricate confusion of its swarming mass wonderfully natural and easy to be grasped. Paris, in fact, under the transforming magic of this woman’s touch, became curiously American, the enchantment beautifully like Eugene’s own far-off visions as a child.
It was astounding. The whole city had suddenly taken on the clear and unperplexing proportions of a map—of one of those beautifully simple and comforting maps which are sold to tourists, in which everything is charming, colourful, and cosy as a toy, and where everything that need be known—all the celebrated “points of interest”—the Eiffel Tower, the Madeleine, and Notre Dame, the Trocadéro, and the Arc de Triomphe, are pictured charmingly, in vivid colours.
Paris, in fact, had this morning become a brilliant, lovely, flashing toy. It was a toy which had been miraculously created for the enjoyment of brilliant, knowing and sophisticated Americans like Elinor and himself. It was a toy which could be instantly understood, preserved and enjoyed, a toy that they could play with to their hearts’content, a toy which need confuse and puzzle none of them for a moment, particularly since Elinor was there to explain the toy and make it go.
It was incredible. Gone was all the blind confusion, the sick despair, the
