As if he didn’t know. But railway stations were like that. The trivial came into its own. It assumed importance in a white light.

You’ll send me a postcard from Paris, he said.

It was really his own voice, but flat and stupid, unbearably banal. From Paris they retreated. It was on the way to the reason for Eden’s going. The retreat was a move they both accepted. She began to talk about the weather, what kind of Channel to expect. She remembered the winter she crossed with Adelaide, and Adelaide was sick in her own hat. That made him laugh. Then he grew ashamed. For it corresponded so distantly with what he felt, that shapeless abyss between his lungs and his stomach. He wondered if he should take her hand, but, wondering, decided not. Even if they were not Eden’s hands, dressed up for the occasion in a pair of old black gloves. He supposed he would never understand the motive behind the wearing of the gloves, why Eden, with her hatred, her fear of convention, had dug up a pair of old black gloves to leave London in. His mouth moved towards a question. It took courage from a moment earlier that evening, when for the first time in his life he had approached his sister without explicit words. But even this, remembered, could not launch him in pursuit of the motive behind the gloves. He failed, deliberately. Because this was something he must not touch on. It was one of the secret places, of which Eden’s life was full.

And then it was time to get into the train. Then it was that quick succession of last moments, and the smell of apples and a magazine, and the voices calling through the yawning of a train, and the faces, and the faces, and the faces. She stood at the window and waved. A short, nervous, jerky wave. Because they had always been a bit ashamed of any gesture they spent upon each other. He noticed that one of her fingers was showing white through the black glove, before this became a speck on the lost hands, before her white face was withdrawing down an infinite tunnel of yellow fog. The little Jewess stood with a purposeless handkerchief. She held it crumpled against her cheek. With the train, the man turned back into Europe on what errand?

Elyot wandered in the street, homeward in fact, but in a sense directionless, on his own train of thought. He would never know the nature of this Jewish errand, the importance of which had dwindled with Eden’s face. He would never fit a motive to the black gloves. These were threads from the so many threads of the mystery you had to accept. And in the streets at night, with the interweaving of passionless faces, the passage of the stolid buses, the downward falling of a steady neon rain, it was easy enough to accept. The whole business was either a mystery, or else meaningless, and of the two, the meaningless is the more difficult to take.