She did not answer.

He held it for a moment, and then opening his hand let it drop.  As she turned away Sylvia heard it fall clinking on the stone floor.  At the door she turned for one last look, and saw him weakly stooping to pick it up again.  She fairly burst out of the door.

It was almost dusk when she was on the street again, looking down the steep incline to the Luxembourg Gardens.  In the rainy twilight the fierce tension of the Rodin “Thinker” in front of the Pantheon loomed huge and tragic.  She gave it a glance of startled sympathy.  She had never understood the statue before.  Now she was a prey to those same ravaging throes.  There was for the moment no escaping them.  She felt none of her former wild impulse to run away.  What she had been running away from had overtaken her.  She faced it now, looked at it squarely, gave it her ear for the first time; the grinding, dissonant note under the rich harmony of the life she had known for all these past months, the obscure vaults underlying the shining temple in which she had been living.

What beauty could there be which was founded on such an action as Felix’ marriage to Molly—­Molly, whose passionate directness had known the only way out of the impasse into which Felix should never have let her go?...  An echo from what she had heard in the mass at Notre Dame rang in her ears, and now the sound was louder—­Austin’s voice, Austin’s words:  “A beauty that can’t endure disharmony in conduct, the fine true ear for the deeper values, the foundations—­” It was Austin, asking himself what beauty could be in any life founded, even remotely as his was, on any one’s misery?

For a long time she stood there, silent, motionless, her hands clenched at her sides, looking straight before her in the rain.  Above her on his pedestal, the great, bronze, naked, tortured man ground his teeth as he glared out from under the inexorable limitations of his ape-like forehead, and strove wildly against the barriers of his flesh....

Wildly and vainly, against inexorable limitations!  Sylvia was aware that an insolent young man, with moist protuberant eyes, had come up where she stood there, alone, motionless on the public street.  He put his arm in hers, clasped her hand in a fat, soft palm, and, “Allons, ma belle!” he said with a revolting gayety.

Sylvia pulled away from him, cried out fiercely in English, “Don’t you dare to touch me!” and darted away.

He made no attempt at pursuit, acknowledging his mistake with an easy shrug and turning off to roam, a dim, predatory figure, along the dusky street.  He had startled and frightened the girl so that she was trembling when she ventured to slow down to a walk under the glaring lights of the Boulevard St. Michel.  She was also shivering with wet and cold, and without knowing it, she was extremely hungry.  As she fled along the boulevard in the direction of her own quarter of the city, her eye caught the lighted clock