on twenty minutes later, the very moment
he stood there, the sense of the Rue de Marignan in the charming room
and in the things about all reconstituted, regrouped, wonderfully
preserved, down to the very sitting-places in the same relations, and
down to the faint sweet mustiness of generations of cigarettes; but
everything else different, and even vaguely alien, and by a measure
still other than that of their own stretched interval and of the dear
delightful woman's just a little pathetic alteration of face. He had
allowed for the nine years, and so, it was to be hoped, had she; but
the last thing, otherwise, that would have been touched, he immediately
felt, was the quality, the intensity, of her care to see him. She cared,
oh so visibly and touchingly and almost radiantly--save for her being,
yes, distinctly, a little _more_ battered than from even a good nine
years' worth; nothing could in fact have perched with so crowning an
impatience on the heap of what she had to "tell" as that special shade
of revived consciousness of having him in particular to tell it to. It
wasn't perhaps much to matter how soon she brought out and caused to
ring, as it were, on the little recognised marqueterie table between
them (such an anciently envied treasure), the heaviest gold-piece of
current history she was to pay him with for having just so felicitously
come back: he knew already, without the telling, that intimate domestic
tension must lately, within those walls, have reached a climax and that
he could serve supremely--oh how he was going to serve!--as the most
sympathetic of all pairs of ears.

The whole thing was upon him, in any case, with the minimum of delay:
Bob had had it from her, definitely, the first of the week, and it
was absolutely final now, that they must set up avowedly separate
lives--without horrible "proceedings" of any sort, but with her own
situation, her independence, secured to her once for all. She had been
coming to it, taking her time, and she had gone through--well, so old a
friend would guess enough what; but she was at the point, oh blessedly
now, where she meant to stay, he'd see if she didn't; with which, in
this wonderful way, he himself had arrived for the cream of it and
she was just selfishly glad. Bob had gone to Washington--ostensibly
on business, but really to recover breath; she had, speaking vulgarly,
knocked the wind out of him and was allowing him time to turn round.
Mrs. Folliott moreov