"What an extraordinary lot of words to tell us that you are an intellectual egoist," he said. "And you needn't have told us at all. We all knew it." Nadine gave her hiccup-laugh. "I am like the starling," she said. "I can't get out. I want to get out and go walking with Hugh. And he can't get in. For what a pack of miseries was le bon Dieu responsible when he thought of the world." "I should have been exceedingly annoyed if He had not thought of me," said Berts. Nadine paused opposite the window-seat, where Hugh was sitting silent. "Oh, Hugh," she said, speaking very low, "there is a real me somewhere, I believe. But I cannot find it. I am like the poor thing in the fairy-tale, that[Pg 91] lost its shadow. Indeed I am in the more desperate plight, I have got my shadow, but I have lost my substance, though not in riotous living." [Pg 91] "For God's sake find it," he said, "and then give it me to keep safe." She looked at him, with her dim smile that always seemed to him to mean the whole world. "When I find it, you shall have it," she said. "And last night it was the moon you wanted," said he, "not yourself." Nadine shrugged her shoulders. "What would you have?" she said. "That was but another point of view. Do not ask me to see things always from the same standpoint. And now, since my mama and Berts have made us all feel old, let us put on our night-caps and put some cold cream on our venerable faces and go to bed. Perhaps to-morrow we shall feel younger." [Pg 92] [Pg 92] CHAPTER IV Seymour Sturgis (who, Berts thought, ought to have been drowned when he was a girl) was employed one morning in July in dusting his jade. He lived in a small flat just off Langham Place, with a large, capable, middle-aged Frenchwoman, who worshiped the ground on which he so delicately trod with the cloth-topped boots which she made so resplendent. She cooked for him in the inimitable manner of her race, she kept his flat speckless and shining, she valeted him, she did everything in fact except dust the jade. Highly as Seymour thought of Antoinette he could not let her do that.
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