G.J. looked round the room.  It was getting very shabby.  Its pale enamelled shabbiness and the tawdry ugliness of nearly every object in it had never repelled and saddened him as they did then.  The sole agreeable item was a large photograph of the mistress in a rich silver frame which he had given her.  She would not let him buy knicknacks or draperies for her drawing-room; she preferred other presents.  And now that she lay in the room, but with no power to animate it, he knew what the room really looked like; it looked like a dentist’s waiting-room, except that no dentist would expose copies of La Vie Parisienne to the view of clients.  It had no more individuality than a dentist’s waiting-room.  Indeed it was a dentist’s waiting-room.  He remembered that he had had similar ideas about the room at the beginning of his acquaintance with Christine; but he had partially forgotten them, and moreover, they had not by any means been so clear and desolating as in that moment.

He looked from the photograph to her face.  The face was like the photograph, but in the swoon its wistfulness became unbearable.  And it was so young.  What was she?  Twenty-seven?  She could not be twenty-eight.  No age!  A girl!  And talk about experience!  She had had scarcely any experience, save one kind of experience.  The monotony and narrowness of her life was terrifying to him.  He had fifty interests, but she had only one.  All her days were alike.  She had no change and no holiday; no past and no future; no family; no intimate friends—­unless Marthe was an intimate friend; no horizons, no prospects.  She witnessed life in London through the distorting, mystifying veil of a foreign language imperfectly understood.  She was the most solitary girl in London, or she would have been were there not a hundred thousand or so others in nearly the same case....  Stay!  Once she had delicately allowed him to divine that she had been to Bournemouth with a gentleman for a week-end.  He could recall nothing else.  Nightly, or almost nightly, she listened to the same insufferably tedious jokes in the same insufferably tedious revue.  But the authorities were soon going to deprive her of the opportunity of doing that.  And then she would cease to receive even the education that revues can furnish, and in her mind no images would survive but images connected with the material arts of love.  For, after all, what had they truly in common, he and she, but a periodical transient excitation?

When next he looked at her, her eyes were wide open and a flush was coming, as imperceptibly as the dawn, into her cheeks.  He took her hands again and rubbed them.  Marthe returned, and Christine drank.  She gazed, in weak silence, first at Marthe and then at G.J.  After a few moments no one spoke.  Marthe took off Christine’s boots, and rubbed her stockinged feet, and then kissed them violently.

“Madame should go to bed.”

“I am better.”