Angelika

“All the' expensive artificialities of life at Cannes, where one saw exactly the same people as at home in slightly thinner clothes, bored her equally. Their transplanted conventions made her feel a traitor to her kind. Her only relief from that hothouse atmosphere was to be found in the flowery foothills of the Maritime Alps, where she went for long, lonely walks, always thinking
of Cyril, in a pagan setting that called for his faun-like presence.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“It was rather fun, as a matter of fact, to adventure into this world of make-believe; it gave her a feeling of rich, unexerted power; kept open a safe line of retreat with her boats unburned. His little, high-brow superiority was really comical — almost pathetic.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“All through the journey, except when she was locked in her sleeper, he did his manly best to entertain her with his rich store of personal and political gossip; but his best, alas, was far too manly for Helena.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories

“And all the time, as the train went whirling through reverberant tunnels, then out into the unspeakable' squalors of the East End
— Bow, Stepney, Whitechapel, Barking — she was thinking how strangely unromantic this honeymoon journey was contrasting it, in spite of herself, with that other southward journey in the Blue Train with Ledwyche.
She didn’t love Ledwyche; she supposed she did love Cyril. And yet, when she came to think of it, how safe she had felt with the other — how many essential, though trivial, things they had had in common! Trivial?
Were they so trivial after all? Weren’t they, in fact, the whole basic structure of her life, her birth, her breeding? With Ledwyche, she knew just exactly where she was, while' 'with this dark stranger. . . .
It came as a shock to her to remember that she didn’t even know his name, nor he hers. That, to begin with, was enough to make the' whole adventure unreal, unsubstantial, uncertain. Yet, hadn’t they agreed — oh,
long ago! — that it was this very circumstance that made the affair so romantically thrilling? Eros and Psyche! . . . To question the illusion was to shatter it. And yet she knew nothing about him, nothing whatever, except
that they shared a few tastes and theories. Why, for all she knew, he might even be a criminal, a murderer!
“Well, here I am,” she thought. “Ca y est! I’ve got to go through with it.”
And of course, to be logical, this journey had not begun at Liverpool Street that morning; it had begun at the moment when Ledwyche had shown her into the train at Cannes. It would end, God knew how, in some
sordid lodging in Southend. “I’m a free woman,” she told herself. “Well, this is the price of freedom.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cage Bird, And Other Stories