Page 700 - women-in-love

air, she drank tiny sips of the Heidelbeerwasser, she ate the
cold, sweet, creamy wafers. How good everything was! How
perfect everything tasted and smelled and sounded, here in
this utter stillness of snow and falling twilight.
‘You are going away tomorrow?’ his voice came at last.
‘Yes.’
There was a pause, when the evening seemed to rise in
its silent, ringing pallor infinitely high, to the infinite which
was near at hand.
‘WOHIN?’
That was the question—WOHIN? Whither? WOHIN?
What a lovely word! She NEVER wanted it answered. Let
it chime for ever.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, smiling at him.
He caught the smile from her.
‘One never does,’ he said.
‘One never does,’ she repeated.
There was a silence, wherein he ate biscuits rapidly, as a
rabbit eats leaves.
‘But,’ he laughed, ‘where will you take a ticket to?’
‘Oh heaven!’ she cried. ‘One must take a ticket.’
Here was a blow. She saw herself at the wicket, at the
railway station. Then a relieving thought came to her. She
breathed freely.
‘But one needn’t go,’ she cried.
‘Certainly not,’ he said.
‘I mean one needn’t go where one’s ticket says.’
That struck him. One might take a ticket, so as not to
travel to the destination it indicated. One might break off,

700 Women in Love