BOOK THE FIFTH: De Stancy And Paula
Miss Power was reclining on a red velvet couch in the bedroom of an old-
fashioned red hotel at Strassburg, and her friend Miss De Stancy was sitting by a
window of the same apartment. They were both rather wearied by a long journey
of the previous day. The hotel overlooked the large open Kleber Platz, erect in
the midst of which the bronze statue of General Kleber received the rays of a
warm sun that was powerless to brighten him. The whole square, with its people
and vehicles going to and fro as if they had plenty of time, was visible to
Charlotte in her chair; but Paula from her horizontal position could see nothing
below the level of the many dormered house-tops on the opposite side of the
Platz. After watching this upper storey of the city for some time in silence, she
asked Charlotte to hand her a binocular lying on the table, through which
instrument she quietly regarded the distant roofs.
'What strange and philosophical creatures storks are,' she said. 'They give a
taciturn, ghostly character to the whole town.'
The birds were crossing and recrossing the field of the glass in their flight hither
and thither between the Strassburg chimneys, their sad grey forms sharply
outlined against the sky, and their skinny legs showing beneath like the limbs of
dead martyrs in Crivelli's emaciated imaginings. The indifference of these birds to
all that was going on beneath them impressed her: to harmonize with their
solemn and silent movements the houses beneath should have been deserted,
and grass growing in the streets.
Behind the long roofs thus visible to Paula over the window- sill, with their tiers of
dormer-windows, rose the cathedral spire in airy openwork, forming the highest
object in the scene; it suggested something which for a long time she appeared
unwilling to utter; but natural instinct had its way.
'A place like this,' she said, 'where he can study Gothic architecture, would, I
should have thought, be a spot more congenial to him than Monaco.'
The person referred to was the misrepresented Somerset, whom the two had
been gingerly discussing from time to time, allowing any casual subject, such as
that of the storks, to interrupt the personal one at every two or three sentences.
'It would be more like him to be here,' replied Miss De Stancy, trusting her tongue
with only the barest generalities on this matter.
Somerset was again dismissed for the stork topic, but Paula could not let him
alone; and she presently resumed, as if an irresistible fascination compelled what
judgment had forbidden: 'The strongest-minded persons are sometimes caught
