“It is like kissing thy maiden aunt, Jacques,” she told him.  “Now, with thee—­” They looked at each other eloquently, and Peter Champneys, whose eyes had followed the girl, smiled crookedly.  An unaccountable gloom descended upon him.  All these lusty young men shouting and laughing around him, all these handsome, ardent young women, snatched what joy from life they could; they lived their hour, knowing how brief that hour must be.  They ate to-day, starved to-morrow; but they were rich because they loved, because they laughed, because theirs was the passionate unforced comradeship, the intoxicating joy of youth.  Peter Champneys, whose good luck was being celebrated, looked at his penniless, hilarious comrades, and twisted a smile of desperate gaiety to his lips.  He had never in his life felt more utterly alone.

The affair ended at six o’clock the next morning, in a last glad, mad romp up the Boul’ Miche.  Peter and Stocks waved good-by to the last revelers, looking somewhat jaded in the fresh morning air.  The two young men, both rather tired, walked slowly.  Venders in clacking sabots pushed their carts ahead of them, shouting their wares.  Crowds of working-people poured through the streets.  At a little restaurant they knew, they had coffee and rolls.  While they were drinking, a girl came in.  Peter looked up and saw Denise.

His first thought was that she would have been lovely if she hadn’t been so thin.  Then he saw how shabby she was, and how neat.  Nothing could have been more charming than her chestnut hair, or her blue eyes that had a look of innocence, or her fair and transparent complexion, though one could have wished she were rosier.  She did not look around with the quick, alert, bright glance of the Parisienne whom everything interests and amuses; she had the abstracted and sad air of a child who suffers, and whom suffering bewilders.

Stocks said, in a low voice, tinged with pity: 

“L’amie de Dangeau.”

Peter received that announcement with a shock of surprise and distaste.  Dangeau was such an utter brute!  Handsome in his way, without conscience or pity, Dangeau would have eaten his mother’s heart to satisfy his own hunger, or wiped his feet upon his father’s beard.  The gifted, intellectual, and rapacious savage seized whatever came near him that pleased his fancy or aroused his curiosity, extracted the pith, and tossed aside what no longer amused or served him.  There was no generosity in him, only an insatiable and ferocious demand that life should give him more, always more!  Peter, who both admired and detested him, was sorry for this gentle creature fallen into his remorseless claws.  And he wondered, as decent men must, at the fatal fascination animals like Dangeau seem to possess for women.

He saw her occasionally after that, always alone.  Plainly, things were not well with her.  Her pale face grew paler and thinner; her dress shabbier.  The look of bewilderment was now a look of pain.  Her eyes were heavy, as if they wept too much.  Peter watched her with a troubled heart.  One day Henri, the garcon, murmured confidentially, as she left the cafe after a particularly slim meal: