After a little while he did not regret Dallas's
indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart
to know that, after all, some one had guessed and
pitied. . . . And that it should have been his wife moved
him indescribably. Dallas, for all his affectionate
insight, would not have understood that. To the boy, no
doubt, the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain
frustration, of wasted forces. But was it really no more?
For a long time Archer sat on a bench in the Champs
Elysees and wondered, while the stream of life rolled
by. . . .
A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska
waited. She had never gone back to her husband, and
when he had died, some years before, she had made no
change in her way of living. There was nothing now to
keep her and Archer apart--and that afternoon he was
to see her.
He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde
and the Tuileries gardens to the Louvre. She had
once told him that she often went there, and he had a
fancy to spend the intervening time in a place where he
could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For
an hour or more he wandered from gallery to gallery
through the dazzle of afternoon light, and one by one
the pictures burst on him in their half-forgotten splendour,
filling his soul with the long echoes of beauty.
After all, his life had been too starved. . . .
Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself
saying: "But I'm only fifty-seven--" and then he
turned away.
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