you’re not doing anything else… perhaps you and Ann might have dinner together.”
“I’m—I’m not,” he stammered, looking at Ann, “but maybe you…”
“No,” she muttered, staring sullenly and miserably at the ground. “I’m not either.”
“Then,” Starwick said, “we’ll see you later, Ann…. And good-bye, Eugene.”
“Good-bye, Frank.”
They shook hands together for the last time, and Starwick and Elinor turned and walked away. Thus, with such brief and casual words, the bond of friendship—all of the faith, belief and passionate avowal of their youth—was for ever broken. They saw each other once thereafter: by chance their lives would have strange crossings; but they never spoke to each other again.
They waited in awkward silence for a moment until they saw Starwick and Elinor get into a taxi and drive off. Then they walked away together across the great quadrangle of the Louvre. A haze of bluish mist, soft, smoky as a veil, hung in the air across the vista’d sweep of the Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde. The little taxis drilled across the great space between the vast wings of the Louvre and through the arches, filling the air with wasp-like drone and menace, the shrill excitement of their tootling horns. And through that veil of bluish haze the vast mysterious voice of Paris reached their ears: it was a sound immense and murmurous as time, fused of the strident clamours of its four million subjects, and yet, strangely muted, seductive, sensuous, cruel and thrilling, filled with life and death. The mysterious fragrance of that life filled Eugene with the potent intoxication of its magic. He drew the pungent smoky air into his lungs, and it seemed freighted with the subtle incense of the great city’s hope and secret promise, with grief and joy and terror, with a wild and nameless hunger, with intolerable desire. It numbed his entrails and his loins with sensual prescience, and it made his heart beat hard and fast; his breath came quickly: it was mixed into the pulses of his blood and gave to grief and joy and sorrow the wild mixed anguish beating in his heart, its single magic, its impalpable desire.
They walked slowly across the great Louvre court and through the gigantic masonries of the arch into the Rue de Rivoli. The street was swarming with its dense web of afternoon: the sensuous complications of its
