They moved forward towards the Grand Canal in silence.  Privately she was considering his case hardly one of extreme hardship.  Privately also, as they advanced nearer and nearer the spot where they had left Mrs. Marshall-Smith, she was a little dreading the return to the perfect breeding with which Aunt Victoria did not ask, or intimate, or look, the question which was in her mind after each of these strolling tete-a-tetes which consistently led nowhere.  There were instants when Sylvia would positively have preferred the vulgar openness of a direct question to which she might have answered, with the refreshing effect to her of a little honest blood-letting:  “Dear Aunt Victoria, I haven’t the least idea myself what’s happening!  I’m simply letting myself go because I don’t see anything else to do.  I have even no very clear idea as to what is going on inside my own head.  I only know that I like Austin Page so much (in spite of a certain quite unforgotten episode) there would be nothing at all unpleasant about marrying him; but I also know that I didn’t feel the least interest in him until Helene told me about his barrels of money:  I also know that I feel the strongest aversion to returning to the Spartan life of La Chance; and it occurs to me that these two things may throw considerable light on my ‘liking’ for Austin.  As for what’s in his mind, there is no subject on which I’m in blacker ignorance.  And after being so tremendously fooled, in the case of Felix, about the degree of interest a man was feeling, I do not propose to take anything for granted which is not on the surface.  It is quite possible that this singularly sincere and simple-mannered man may not have the slightest intention of doing anything more than enjoy a pleasant vacation from certain rather hair-splitting cares which seem to trouble him from time to time.”  As they walked side by side along the stagnant waters, she was sending inaudible messages of this sort towards her aunt; she had even selected the particular mauve speck at the top of the steps which might be Mrs. Marshall-Smith.

In the glowing yellow gold of the sky, a faintly whirring dark-gray spot appeared:  an airman made his way above the Grand Canal, passed above the Chateau, and disappeared.  They had sat down on a bench, the better to crane their heads to watch him out of sight.  Sylvia was penetrated with the strangeness of that apparition in that spot and thrilled out:  “Isn’t it wonderful!  Isn’t it wonderful! Here!”

“There’s something more wonderful!” he said, indicating with his cane the canal before them, where a group of neat, poorly dressed, lower middle-class people looked proudly out from their triumphal progress in the ugly, gasping little motor-boat which operates at twenty-five centimes a trip.

She had not walked and talked a month with him for nothing.  She knew that he did not refer to motor-boats as against aeroplanes.  “You mean,” she said appreciatively, “you mean those common people going freely around the royal canal where two hundred years ago—­”