In the afternoon I saw Mrs. Summer, but only for a moment. She told me Miss Brandon had sent me a lot of messages, and I wanted to ask her what had happened and how things stood, but she had an engagement. We arranged to meet and have a long talk the next morning.
But when the next morning came, I got a message from her, saying she had been obliged to go to London at once to meet her husband.
A little later in the day, I received a letter by post from my unmarried sister, saying she would meet me in Paris and we could both go back to Italy together. So I decided to do this. I saw Rudd once before I left. He dined with me on my last night. He said that his holiday was shortly coming to an end. He would spend three days at Bayreuth and then he would go back to work.
"No, not on that." He doubted whether he would ever touch that again. The idea of it had been only a holiday amusement at first. "But now," he said, "the idea has grown. If I do it, it will have to be a real book, even if only a short one, a _nouvelle._ The idea is a fascinating one. The Sleeping Beauty awake and changed in an alien world. Perhaps I may do it some day. If I do, I will send it to you. In any case I was right about Miss Brandon. She would be a better heroine for a fairy tale than for a modern story. She is too emotionless, too calm for a modern novel."
"I have got another idea," he went on, "I am thinking of writing a story about a woman who looked as delicate as a flower, and who crushed those who came into contact with her and destroyed those who loved her. The idea is only a shadow as yet. But it may come to something. In any case I must do some regular work at once. I have had a long enough holiday. I have been wasting my time. I have enjoyed it, it has done me good, and conversations are never wasted, as they are the breeding ground of ideas. Sometimes the ideas do not flower for years. But the seed is sown in talk. I am grateful to you too, and I hope I shall meet you here again next year. I can't invent anything unless I am in sympathetic surroundings."
The next day I left Haréville and met my sister in Paris. We travelled to Cadenabbia together.
Two years after I had written these few chapters, I was sent once more to Haréville. Again I went early in the season. There was nobody left of the old group I had known during my first visit. Mrs. Lennox and her niece were not there, and they were not expected. They had spent some months at Haréville the preceding year.