“My Fanny?”
“Well, the woman you’d have chucked everything for: only you didn’t,” continued his surprising son.
“I didn’t,” echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.
“No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said—”
“Your mother?”
“Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone—you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.”
Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: “She never asked me.”
“No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other’s private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.—I say, Dad,” Dallas broke off, “you’re not angry with me? If you are, let’s make it up and go and lunch at Henri’s. I’ve got to rush out to Versailles afterward.”
Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.