But she said aloud at once, almost as though she had crooked an arm to shield herself:  “But he said he did not want me to answer at once!  He said he wanted me to take time—­to take time—­to take time ...”  She hastened her steps to this refrain, until she was almost running; and emerged upon the broad, well-kept expanse of the Boulevard St. Germain with a long-drawn breath of relief.

Ahead of her to the right, the Rue St. Jacques climbed the hill to the Pantheon.  She took it because it was broad and clean and differed from the musty darkness from which she had come out; she fled up the steep grade with a swift, light step as though she were on a country walk.  She might indeed have been upon some flat road near La Chance for all she saw of the buildings, the people around her.

How like Austin’s fine courage that was, his saying that he did not want her to decide in haste, but to take time to know what she was doing!  What other man would not have stayed to urge her, to hurry her, to impose his will on hers, masterfully to use his personality to confuse her, to carry her off?  For an instant, through all her wretched bewilderment, she thrilled to a high, impersonal appreciation of his saying:  “If I had stayed with you, I should have tried to take you by force—­but you are too fine for that, Sylvia!  What you could be to the man you loved if you went to him freely—­that is too splendid to risk losing.  I want all of you—­heart, soul, mind—­or nothing!” Sylvia looked up through this clear white light to Austin’s yearning eyes, and back through the ages with a wondering pity at the dark figure of Jerry Fiske, emerging from his cave.  She had come a long way since then.

And then all this, everything fine, everything generous, ebbed away from her with deadly swiftness, and in a cold disgust with herself she knew that she had been repeating over and over Morrison’s “Austin will not have a cent left ... nothing but those Vermont scrub forests.”  So that was the kind of a woman she was.  Well, if that was the kind of woman she was, let her live her life accordingly.  She was sick with indecision as she fled onward through the rain.

Few pedestrians were abroad in the rain, and those who were, sheltered themselves slant-wise with their umbrellas against the wind, and scudded with the storm.  Sylvia had an umbrella, but she did not open it.  She held her face up once, to feel the rain fall on it, and this reminded her of home, and long rainy walks with her father.  She winced at this, and put him hastily out of her mind.  And she had been unconsciously wishing to see her mother!  At the very recollection of her mother she lengthened her stride.  There was another thought to run away from!