which follows the line of the Rue de Rivoli, suffering her even,
when they reached its farthest end, to direct him in silence up the
steps to the terrace of the Feuillants. For, after all, the
possibilities were double-faced, and her bold departure from custom
might simply mean that what she had to say was so dreadful that it
needed all the tenderest mitigation of circumstance.

There was apparently nothing embarrassing to her in his silence: it
was a part of her long European discipline that she had learned to
manage pauses with ease. In her Frisbee days she might have packed
this one with a random fluency; now she was content to let it widen
slowly before them like the spacious prospect opening at their feet.
The complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it
between the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace,
touched him anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast
impersonal power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he
could not guess, putting between himself and her the whole width of
the civilization into which her marriage had absorbed her. And there
was such fear in the thought--he read such derision of what he had
to offer in the splendour of the great avenues tapering upward to
the sunset glories of the Arch--that all he had meant to say when he
finally spoke compressed itself at last into an abrupt unmitigated:
"Well?"

She answered at once--as though she had only awaited the call of the
national interrogation--"I don't know when I have been so happy."

"So happy?" The suddenness of his joy flushed up through his fair
skin.