This has been ours, however brief the time.
Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind.
Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.
This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls.
That was yesterday.
Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way.
We can never be quite the.same again.
Even stopping for luncheon at a wayside inn, and going to a dark, unfamiliar room to wash my hands, the handle of the door unknown to me, the wallpaper peeling in strips, a funny little cracked mirror above the basin; for this moment, it is mine, it belongs to me.
We know one another.
This is the present.
There is no past and no future.
Here I am washing my hands, and the tracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.
And then I open the door and go to the dining-room, where he is sitting waiting for me at a table, and I think how in that moment I have aged, passed on, how I have advanced one step towards an unknown destiny.
We smile, we choose our lunch, we speak of this and that, but — I say to myself — I am not she who left him five minutes ago. She stayed behind.
I am another woman, older, more mature…
I saw in a paper the other day that the Hotel Cote d'Azur at Monte Carlo had gone to new management, and had a different name.
The rooms have been redecorated, and the whole interior changed.
Perhaps Mrs Van Hopper's suite on the first floor exists no more.
Perhaps there is no trace of the small bedroom that was mine.
I knew I should never go back, that day I knelt on the floor and fumbled with the awkward catch of her trunk.
The episode was finished, with the snapping of the lock.
I glanced out of the window, and it was like turning the page of a photograph album.
Those roof-tops and that sea were mine no more.
They belonged to yesterday, to the past.
The rooms already wore an empty air, stripped of our possessions, and there was something hungry about the suite, as though it wished us gone, and the new arrivals, who would come tomorrow, in our place.
The heavy luggage stood ready strapped and locked in the corridor outside. The smaller stuff would be finished later.
Waste-paper baskets groaned under litter. All her half empty medicine bottles and discarded face-cream jars, with torn-up bills and letters.
Drawers in tables gaped, the bureau was stripped bare.
She had flung a letter at me the morning before, as I poured out her coffee at breakfast.
'Helen is sailing for New York on Saturday.
Little Nancy has a threatened appendix, and they've cabled her to go home.
That's decided me.
We're going too.
I'm tired to death of Europe, and we can come back in the early fall.
How d'you like the idea of seeing New York?'
The thought was worse than prison.
Something of my misery must have shown in my face, for at first she looked astonished, then annoyed.
'What an odd, unsatisfactory child you are.
I can't make you out.
Don't you realise that at home girls in your position without any money can have the grandest fun?
Plenty of boys and excitement.
All in your own class.
You can have your own little set of friends, and needn't be at my beck and call as much as you are here.
I thought you didn't care for Monte?'
'I've got used to it,' I said lamely, wretchedly, my mind a conflict.
'Well, you'll just have to get used to New York, that's all.
We're going to catch that boat of Helen's, and it means seeing about our passage at once.
Go down to the reception office right away, and make that young clerk show some sign of efficiency.
Your day will be so full that you won't have time to have any pangs about leaving Monte!'
She laughed disagreeably, squashing her cigarette in the butter, and went to the telephone to ring up all her friends.