This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world of my London friends and acquaintances.  I perceived, of course, from Miss Kate’s attitude that something must have occurred, or something must have been assumed, to my prejudice.  Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a time, and the rumour ran that we were away together.  I smiled frigidly.  What matter?  In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I left without delay and went back to my coupe; it would have been a pity to derange these dames.  Me away with Frank!  What folly to suppose it!  Yet it might have been.  I was in heart what these dames probably took me for.  I read a little in the Imitation of Christ which Aunt Constance had meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even Christianity itself.  ‘Think not that thou hast made any progress,’ I read, ’unless thou feel thyself inferior to all ...  Behold how far off thou art yet from true charity and humility:  which knows not how to be angry or indignant, with any except one’s self.’

Night fell.  The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its invisible way under a dome of stars.  It shrieked by mysterious stations, dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save their coloured signals of safety.  Ages of oscillation seemed to pass.  In traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs of wearied humanity:  magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in the abandoned attitudes of fatigue—­here and there a compartment with blinds discreetly drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and here and there a group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves nothing could affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train and every steamer a few such are to be found.

More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun.  At length we thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their facades occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under streets and over canals.  Paris! the city of the joy of life!  We were to see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman.  We panted to a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial quarters.  Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we trailed slowly our disgust.