one more of his costly, wrong, and tragically futile efforts to find a place—some impossibly fortunate and favourable place that never would be found—where he could “settle down and get his writing done.”
When the four friends got to the pension, dinner had already begun. A table had been reserved for them, and as they entered the dining-room everyone stopped eating—two dozen pairs of old dead eyes were turned mistrustfully upon the young people, and in a moment, all over the room, at every table, the old heads bent together eagerly in conspiratorial secrecy, a low greedy whispering went up.
Starwick and Elinor were apparently already well and unfavourably known to the old pensionnaires. The moment they entered, in the vast and sibilant whispering that went round the room, envenomed fragments of conversation could be heard:
“Ah, c’est lui!… Et la dame aussi!… Ils sont revenus ensemble…. Mais oui, oui!” At the next table to them an old hag with piled masses of dyed reddish hair, dressed in an old-fashioned dress bedecked with a thousand little gauds, peered at them for a moment with an expression of venomous and greedy curiosity, and then, leaning half across the table towards an old man with a swollen apoplectic face and thick white moustaches, and a little wizened old hag with the beady eyes of a reptile—possibly his wife—she hissed:
“Mais oui!… Oui!… C’est lui, le jeune Américain!… Personne ici ne l’a pas vu depuis trois mois.” The old man here muttered something in a choked and phlegmy sort of voice, and the old parrot-visaged hag straightened, struck her bony hand sharply on the table, and cried out in a comical booming note:
“Mais justement!… Justement!… C’est comme vous voyez!”… Here she lowered her voice again, and peering round craftily at Elinor and Frank, who were shaking with laughter, she muttered hoarsely:
“Il n’est pas son mari!… Il est beaucoup plus jeune…. Mais non, mais non, mais non, mais non, mais non!” she cried with a rapid and violent impatience as the old man muttered out a question to her greedy ear.—“Elle est déjà mariée!… Oui! Oui!” This last was boomed out positively, with an indignant glance at Elinor. “Mais justement! Justement!… C’est comme vous voyez!”
That night Elinor was instant, swift, and happy as a flash of light. There was nothing that she did not seem to apprehend immediately, to interpret instantly, to understand before a word could be spoken, and
