At last she went to her room.
It was a tiny house, in Neuilly, but it had a bit of garden and there was a little pavilion at the end of it.
When we married she gave us the house and moved in there so that she could be with her son and yet not on the top of us.
Robert came up to our room and he waked me with a kiss on my lips.
His eyes were shining.
He had blue eyes, not so blue as yours, gray rather, but they were large and very brilliant.
There was almost always a smile in them.
They were wonderfully alert.”
But Lydia had gradually slowed down the pace of her speech as she came to these sentences.
It was as though a thought had struck her and she was turning it over in her mind while she talked.
She looked at Charley with a curious expression.
“There is something in your eyes that reminds me of him, and your face is the same shape as his.
He wasn’t so tall as you and he hadn’t got your English complexion.
He was very good-looking.”
She was silent for a moment.
“What a malicious fool that Simon of yours is.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing.”
She leant forward, with her elbows on the table, her face in her hands, and went on, in a rather monotonous voice, as though she were reciting under hypnosis something that was passing before her vacant eyes.
“I smiled when I woke.
“ ‘How late you are,’ I said.
‘Be quick and come to bed.’
“ ‘I can’t sleep now,’ he said.
‘I’m too excited.
I’m hungry.
Are there any eggs in the kitchen?’
“I was wide awake by then.
You can’t think how charming he looked sitting on the side of the bed in his new gray suit.
He was always well-dressed and he wore his clothes wonderfully well.
His hair was very beautiful, dark brown and waving, and he wore it long, brushed back on his head.
“ ‘I’ll put on a dressing-gown and we’ll go and see,’ I said.
“We went into the kitchen and I found eggs and onions.
I fried the onions and scrambled them with the eggs.
I made some toast.
Sometimes when we went to the theatre or had been to a concert we used to make ourselves something to eat when we got home.
He loved scrambled eggs and onions, and I cooked them just in the way he liked.
We used to love those modest suppers that we had by ourselves in the kitchen.
He went into the cellar and brought out a bottle of champagne.
I knew his mother would be cross, it was the last of half a dozen bottles that Robert had had given him by one of his racing friends, but he said he felt like champagne just then and he opened the bottle.
He ate the eggs greedily and he emptied his glass at a gulp.
He was in tearing spirits.
When we first got into the kitchen I’d noticed that though his eyes were shining so brightly his face was pale, and if I hadn’t known that nothing was more unlikely I should have thought he’d been drinking, but now the colour came back to his cheeks.
I thought he’d been just tired and hungry.
He’d been out all day, tearing about, I was sure, and it might be that he hadn’t had a bite to eat.
Although we’d only been parted a few hours he was almost crazy with joy at being with me again.
He couldn’t stop kissing me and while I was scrambling the eggs I had to push him away because he wanted to hug me and I was afraid he’d spoil the cooking.
But I couldn’t help laughing.
We sat side by side at the kitchen table as close as we could get.
He called me every sweet, endearing name he could think of, he couldn’t keep his hands off me, you would have thought we’d only been married a week instead of six months.
When we’d finished I wanted to wash everything up so that when his mother came in for breakfast she shouldn’t find a mess, but he wouldn’t let me.