"Thinking! That's all I had to do! I spent a lifetime standing on the hill with the woods behind me trying to catch the music of this street, the sound of this very car, and I thought it all out, every bit of it."

"Every bit of what?"

"Life and death and the great hereafter," she said, "principally life. That's why I'm going out to dinner with you instead of going early to bed."

The glare of a lamp silvered her profile and the young curve of her bosom. Somewhere, at some time, Palgrave had knelt humbly, with strange anguish and hunger, at the feet of a girl with just that young proud face and those unawakened eyes. The memory of it was like an echo of an echo.

"Why," said Joan, halting for a moment on her way to the steps of the old hotel, "this looks like a picture postcard of a bit of Paris."

"Yes, on the other side of the Seine, near the Odeon. Our grandfathers imagined that they were very . . . Read More