at the kiosk near Cluny.  She was astonished to see that it was after seven o’clock.  How long could she have stood there, under the shadow of that terrific Thinker, consumed quite as much as he by the pain of trying to rise above mere nature?  An hour—­more than an hour, she must have been there.  The Pantheon must have closed during that time, and the dreadful, sick man must have passed close by her.  Where was he now?  What makeshift shelter harbored that cough, those dirty, skeleton hands, those awful eyes which had outlived endurance and come to know peace before death....

She shivered and tried to shrink away from her wet, clinging clothing.  She had never, in all her life before, been wet and cold and hungry and frightened, she had never known from what she had been protected.  And now the absence of money meant that she must walk miles in the rain before she could reach safety and food.  For three cents she could ride.  But she had not three cents.  How idiotic she had been not to keep a few sous from her purse.  What a sickening thing it had been to see him stoop to pick it up after he had tried to have the pride not to touch it.  That was what morphine had done for him.  And he would buy more morphine with that money, that was the reason he had not been able to let it lie ... the man who had been to her little girlhood the radiant embodiment of strength and fineness!

Her teeth were chattering, her feet soaked and cold.  She tried to walk faster to warm her blood, and discovered that she was exhausted, tired to the marrow of her bones.  Her feet dragged on the pavement, her arms hung heavily by her side, but she dared not stop a moment lest some other man with abhorrent eyes should approach her.

She set her teeth and walked; walked across the Seine without a glance at its misted lights blinking through the rain, walked on past the prison of Marie Antoinette, without a thought of that other harmless woman who had loved bright and lovely things while others suffered:  walked on upon the bridge across the Seine again.  This bewildered her, making her think that she was so dazed she had doubled on her tracks.  She saw, a long way off, a solitary hooded sergent de ville, and dragged herself across an endless expanse of wet asphalt to ask him her way.  But just before she reached him, she remembered suddenly that of course she was on the island and was obliged to cross the Seine again before reaching the right bank.  She returned weary and disheartened to her path, crossed the bridge, and then endlessly, endlessly, set one heavy foot before the other under the glare of innumerable electric lights staring down on her and on the dismal, wet, and deserted streets.  The clocks she passed told her that it was nearly eight o’clock.  Then it was past eight.  What must they be thinking of her on the Rue de Presbourg?  She tried again to hurry, but could force her aching muscles to no more than the plod, plod, plod of her dogged advance