At five o’clock the skylight over the stairway and the blank, black windows on each of the landings were pitch dark—dark with the season, dark with the cold, dark with the dark air of cities. The only light on the street was the blue neon sign of a snack bar. My sister had been in Paris six months, but she still could say, “What a funny French word that is, Puss—‘snack.’” Louise’s progress down the steps was halting and slow. At the best of times she never hurried, and now she was guiding her bicycle and carrying a trench coat, a plaid scarf, Herriot’s Life of Beethoven, Cassell’s English-French, a bottle of cough medicine she intended to exchange for another brand, and a notebook, in which she had listed facts about nineteenth-century music under so many headings, in so many divisions of divisions, that she had lost sight of the whole. The dictionary, the Herriot, the cough medicine, and the scarf were mine. I was the music mistress, out in all weathers, subject to chills, with plenty of woolen garments to lend.
