‘Well,’ said Fred.

They drank a toast to home, in the smoking-room, which wasn’t a smoking-room but an alcove off the lounge.

‘Let’s drink an extra one to Annabel — best of the lot,’ proposed Fred.

Hazel giggled. ‘You’re so funny! You don’t know yourself one single bit? You’re half in love with that girl, and you have no idea of it!’

‘You think so? Ha, ha!’ he said.

It made his voyage of discovery of himself curiously easier to travel with a pleasant person who did not embarrass him by understanding him.

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Last updated Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 11:57

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 37

The Villa Sophie, at Belfayol, on the Côte d’Azur between Hyères and St. Tropez, was a smart little pension, a respectable pension, a white pension streaked with purple bougainvillaea, on the beach, overlooking the fishing boats, with the tiny casino only two blocks away, and with victorias, in which no one ever seemed to drive, always standing in front of it. It had a tidy salon with Spanish arm-chairs, yellow marble-topped tables, grey marble floor, and gold-coloured curtains. Tea could be had in an arbour in the rose garden. And though the bedrooms were small, their long windows, opening like doors, gave on tiny iron balconies facing the full brilliance of the tideless sea.

At the Villa Sophie, in late April, Frederick William Cornplow & wfe, as it was stated in the pension register, were living the life of international culture de luxe, all modern improvements, lowest rates.

They had seen perhaps one half per cent of London (on the ‘side trip’ from Hull), of Rotterdam and Brest, of a Lisbon hysterical with the waxing Spanish revolution, of Capri by way of Naples, of divine Venice, of Ragusa, Athens and at last of Istanbul. (They blushed that they had ever called it ‘Constantinople’. Which name they went right on calling it, whenever they weren’t careful.)

At Istanbul, Fred was embarrassingly near to the golden road to Samarkand, and at Istanbul he was uncomfortable to a point of terror. He didn’t understand what they sold in these crazy littered shops; he didn’t know how to get a hot bath; he saw no Triumph cars nor ever heard a meaty American voice. He was a Heck Centre pup lost on Hester Street.

Though they had not known there was such a thing as a Jugoslavian steamer, a particularly trim and slim and black-and-nickel Jugoslavian craft had taken them back to Villefranche, whence they timidly drove to Belfayol.

In Ragusa they had received, and in the shadow of its old walls they had re-re-read, the cable from Sara saying that she had just been married to Walter Lindbeck, her boss, and could they rent the Cornplow home?

Yes, they could, Fred cabled, though he felt that with the den of their wolf cubs thus gone, and with Hazel daily more sprightly about the joys of Europe and the Great World, he would never be able to return now to the one place in the world he longed to see.