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Dinner over, the young Jew, Reherrey, having sent for two cars from the garage, drove the tired Englishwomen to their billets. As the cars passed down the cobbled streets and over a great bridge, Fanny saw water gleam in the gulf below. "What river is that?" "The Moselle." A sentry challenged them on the far side of the bridge. "Now we are in the outer town, the German quarter."
They had no black bombazine. "Black tulle," said Reherrey, with his air of cool indifference, "black gauze, black cotton..." It had to be black sateen in the end. "Now you!" said Reherrey, when he had bought six yards at eight francs a yard. "White ... something ... for me." There was white nothing under sixteen francs a yard.
Presently the Jew boy, Reherrey, detached himself from the others and came out to stand by her and flatter her. He had wound the black stuff that he had bought three days before so cleverly round his slim body that he seemed no fatter than a lacquered hairpin.
"I'm going to Weile," he said. "I'm going there myself." "To get your dress?" "Yes." They went into the large, empty shop together, to be surrounded at once by a group of idle girls. "Stuffs ..." said Fanny, thinking vaguely. "Black bombazine," said Reherrey, who had finished his thinking. Fanny followed Reherrey to a newly-polished counter, backed by rows of empty shelves.
Here and there a shelf held a roll or two of some material, and eventually Fanny bought seven yards of white soft stuff at seven francs a yard. "White," said Reherrey, with a critical look; "how English!" Fanny had an idea of her own. "Wo," she said heavily to Elsa's mother still later in the evening, "ist eine Schneiderin?" "A dressmaker who speaks French...."
And going home, each would study the hours they had spent together, as a traveller returned from wonderful lands pores over the cold map which for him sparkles with mountains and rivers. That very Saturday night after the early supper in their room in the town, she had gone out to the big draper's shop which did not close till seven, almost running into Reherrey on the pavement.
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