“Good-bye, Frank. Good-bye, my enemy.”
“And good-bye, my friend,” said Starwick. He went out, and the door closed behind him.
Eugene was waiting for them at four o’clock that afternoon when they came out from the Louvre. As he saw them coming down the steps together he felt a sudden, blind rush of affection for all of them, and saw that all of them were fine people. Elinor came towards him instantly, and spoke to him warmly, kindly, and sincerely, without a trace of mannerism or affectation or concealed spitefulness. Starwick stood by quietly while he talked to Elinor: Ann looked on sullenly and dumbly and thrust her hands in the pockets of her fur jacket. In the dull, grey light they looked like handsome, first-rate, dignified people, who had nothing mean or petty in them and with whom nothing but a spacious, high and generous kind of life was possible. By comparison, the Frenchmen coming from the museum and streaming past them looked squalid and provincial; and the Americans and other foreigners had a shabby, dull, inferior look. For a moment the bitter and passionate enigma of life pierced him with desperation and wild hope. What was wrong with life? What got into people such as these to taint their essential quality, to twist and warp and mutilate their genuine and higher purposes? What were these perverse and evil demons of cruelty and destructiveness, of anguish, error and confusion that got into them, that seemed to goad them on, with a wicked and ruinous obstinacy, deliberately to do the things they did not want to do—the things that were so shamefully unworthy of their true character and their real desire?
It was maddening because it was so ruinous, so wasteful and so useless; and because it was inexplicable. As these three wonderful, rare and even beautiful people stood there saying to him good-bye, every movement, look, and word they uttered was eloquent with the quiet but passionate and impregnable conviction of the human faith. Their quiet, serious, and affectionate eyes, their gestures, their plain, clear, and yet affectionate speech, even the instinctive tenderness that they felt towards one another which seemed to join them with a unity of living warmth and was evident in the way they stood, glanced at each other, or in swift, instinctive gestures—all this with a radiant, clear, and naked loveliness seemed to speak out of them in words no one could misunderstand, to say:
