One day in November when their notice at the hotel was nearly expired, Vivie proposed an expedition to her mother.  They would walk slowly—­because Mrs. Warren now got easily out of breath—­up to the Jardin Bontanique; Vivie would leave her there in the Palm House.  It was warm; it was little frequented; there were seats and the Belgians in charge knew Mrs. Warren of old time.  Vivie would then go on along the inner Boulevards by tram and look at some rooms recommended by Minna von Stachelberg in the Quartier St. Gilles.

Mrs. Warren did as she was told.  Vivie left her seated in one of the long series of glass houses overlooking Brussels from a terrace, wherein are assembled many glories of the tropics:  palms, dracaenas, yuccas, aloes, tree-ferns, cycads, screw-pines, and bananas:  promising to be back in an hour’s time.

Somehow as she sat there it seemed to Mrs. Warren it was going for her to be the last hour of fully conscious life—­fully conscious and yet a curious mingling in it of the past and present.  She had sat here in the middle of the ’seventies with Vivie’s father, the young Irish seminarist, her lover for six months.  He had a vague interest in botany, and during his convalescence after his typhoid fever, when she was still his nurse, not yet his mistress, she used to bring him here to rest and to enjoy the aspect of these ferns and palms.  What a strange variety of men she had known.  Some she had loved, more or less; some she had exploited frankly.  Some—­like George Crofts and Baxendale Strangeways—­she had feared, though in her manner she had tried to conceal her dread of their violence.  Well! she had taken a lot of money off the rich, but she had never plundered the poor.  Her greatest conquest—­and that when she was a woman of forty—­was the monarch of this very country which now lay crushed under the Kaiser’s heel.  For a few months he had taken a whimsical liking to her handsome face, well-preserved figure, and amusing cockney talk.  But he had employed her rather as the mistress of his menus plaisirs, as his recruiting agent.  He had rewarded her handsomely.  Now it was all in the dust:  her beautiful Villa Beau-sejour a befouled barrack for German soldiers.  She herself a homeless woman, repudiated by the respectable British and Americans more or less interned in this unhappy city.

Not much more than a year ago she had been one of the most respected persons in Brussels, with a large income derived from safe investments.  Now all she had for certain was something over three thousand pounds in bank notes that might turn out next month to be worthless paper.  And was she certain even of them?  Had Vivie before they left the hotel remembered to put some, at least, of this precious sum on her person?  Suppose, whilst they were out, looking for a fresh dwelling place, the hotel servants or the police raided her bedroom and found the little hoard of notes?  This imagined danger made her want to cry.  They were so friendless now, she in particular felt so completely deserted.  Had she deserved this punishment by Fate?  Was there after all a God who minded much about the sex foolishnesses and punished you for irregularities—­for having lovers in your youth, for selling your virtue and inducing other women to sell theirs?  Was she going to die soon and was there a hereafter?’ She burst out crying in an abandonment of grief.