Even in Montreal faint echoes of this state of things had reached me, but not until I went to see Anne on my return did I get any idea of their cause.  She had taken a furnished apartment from a friend, in a dreary building in one of the West Forties.  Only a jutting front of limestone and an elevator man in uniform saved it, or so it seemed to me, from being an old-fashioned boarding house.  Its windows, small, as if designed for an African sun, looked northward upon a darkened street.  Anne’s apartment was on the second floor, and the requirements of some caryatids on the outside rendered her fenestration particularly meager.  Her friend, if indeed it were a friend, had not treated her generously in the matter of furniture.  She had left nothing superfluous but two green glass jugs on the mantelpiece, and had covered the chairs with a chintz, the groundwork of which was mustard colour.

Another man who was there when I came in, who evidently had known Anne in different surroundings, expressed the most hopeful view possible when he said that doubtless it would all look charming when she had arranged her own belongings.

Anne made a little gesture.  “I haven’t any belongings,” she said.

I didn’t know what she meant, perhaps merely a protest against the tyranny of things, but I saw the effect her speech produced on her auditor.  Perhaps she saw it too, for presently she added:  “Oh, yes!  I have one.”

And she went away, and came back carrying a beautiful old silver loving cup.  I knew it well.  It came from Julian’s forebears.  Anne had always loved it, and I was delighted that she should have it now.  She set it on a table before a mirror, and here it did a double share to make the room possible.

When we were alone I expressed my opinion of her choice of lodgings.

“This sunless cavern!” I said.  “This parlour-car furniture!”

She looked a little hurt.  “You don’t like it?” she said.

“Do you?” I snapped back.

After a time I had recourse to the old argument that it didn’t look well; that it wasn’t fair to Julian.  But she had been expecting this.

“My dear Walter,” she answered, “you must try to be more consistent.  In Paris you told me that I must cease to regulate my life by Julian.  You were quite right.  This place pleases me, and I don’t intend to go to a hotel, which I hate, or to take a house, which is a bother, in order to soothe Julian’s feelings.  I have begun to lead my life to suit myself.”

The worst of it was, I could think of no answer.

A few evenings afterward we dined at the same house.  Anne arrived with a scarf on her head, under the escort of a maid.  She had come in a trolley car.  Nobody’s business but her own, perhaps, if she would have allowed it to remain so, but when she got up to go, and other people were talking of their motors’ being late, Anne had to say:  “Mine is never late; it goes past the corner every minute.”