Altogether it was an expedition. It had the spirit of this. You could feel it in the glossy atmosphere of the damp French watering place, in the palmy vestibule of the rather vulgar, ornate hotel. And so much taken for granted, almost a change in relationship signing your name at the reception desk. If this were Maudie Westmacott, felt Catherine Standish. She caught herself swaggering across the carpet when the porter left them alone in their room. The swagger of Maudie Westmacott.

There were moments, and this was one of them, when she thought she would have it out with Willy, just in a joking way, the question of Maudie Westmacott. Because since the baby she had begun to feel safe. But always she paused on second thought. And now. She wanted this to be, well, some kind of festival, she put it sentimentally, she wanted nothing to come between her and the expression of what, at moments like these, she felt that she felt for Willy. So she swallowed Maudie Westmacott.

It was a day of trudging and excitement in small, damp streets. There was always another corner to another street. She had to see. She had to look. She had to buy the chocolates and the macaroons. In her enthusiasm the stately Mrs Standish became once more Kitty Goose, the straying hair beneath the hat, and the bright, expectant look she had worn in winter lanes. If we had not been extravagant, felt Mrs Standish, this would be Paris. But in her present mood she did not resent the alternative. She could make it a touching second-best, full of intensified sensation, the sensation sometimes attached to making the best.

Willy entered in. Not without suggesting he had often been abroad, not without a trace of patronage, those travellers’ tales that fitted themselves to every moment of the present as it happened, and practically obliterated this. There was the time in Naples, and the time in Smyrna, that she might like to share without completely grasping. But she even encouraged patronage, grateful to hang on his arm, or to sit with her hands in her lap. After all, what did it matter, provided she expressed by an attitude or word the tenderness she felt for Willy?

So he talked. They dined. And they sat at the Café des Tribunaux, where it was cold, it had begun to drizzle. Willy said what an advantage it was to be able to sit on the pavement in France. Yes, she said, shivering, wondering if her shoes, if the soles of her shoes. Willy said she must try a Pernod. Garçon, he said, deux Pernods. It wasn’t the right time of day, he explained, she must remember that, but a first day in France without a Pernod, you just had to have a Pernod. So she tasted with some misgiving the pale and milky liquid that they brought her in a glass, that she wanted to enjoy, that she wanted to drink with the right air of drinking Pernods on French pavements. Because Willy said.