out next week, Ann and I will do the driving, you two boys can loaf and invite your souls to your hearts’content, and when you see a place that looks like a good place to work in, we’ll stop and stay until you’re tired of working. Then we’ll go on again.”
“Where?” said Starwick in a dead and toneless voice. “Go on where?”
“Why, my dear child!” Elinor cried in a gay tone. "Anywhere! Wherever you like! That’s the beauty of it! We’re not going to be bound down by any programme, any schedule: we shall stay where we like and go anywhere our sweet selves desire.
“I thought, however,” she continued in a more matter-of-fact way, “that we would go first to Chartres and then on to Touraine, stopping off at Orléans or Blois or Tours—anywhere we like, and staying as long as we care to. After that, we could do the Pyrenees and all that part of France: we might stop a few days at Biarritz and then strike off into the Basque country. I know incredible little places we could stop at.”
“Could we see Spain?” asked Starwick for the first time with a note of interest in his voice.
“But, of course!” she cried. “My dear child, we can see anything, everything, go anywhere your heart desires. That’s the beauty of the whole arrangement. If you feel like writing, if you want to run down to Spain to get a little writing done—why, presto! chango! Alacazam!” she said gaily, snapping her fingers, “—the thing is done! There’s nothing simpler!”
For a moment, no one spoke. They all sat entranced in a kind of unwilling but magical spell of wonder and delight. Elinor, with her power to make everything seem delightfully easy, and magically simple and exciting, had clothed that fantastic programme with all the garments of naturalness and reason. Everything now seemed not only possible, but beautifully, persuasively practicable—even that ludicrous project of “running down to Spain to do a little writing,” that hopeless delusion of “stopping off and working, anywhere you like, until you are ready to go on again”—she gave to the whole impossible adventure not only the thrilling colours of sensuous delight and happiness, but also the conviction of a serious purpose, a reasonable design.
And in a moment, Starwick, rousing himself from his abstracted and fascinated reverie, turned to Eugene and, with the old gleeful burble of laughter in his throat, remarked simply in his strangely fibred voice:
“It sounds swell, doesn’t it?”
And Ann, whose sullen, baffled look had more and more been tempered
