“It is somewhat cold, eh!  He will say:  Eh, well, it is true then!”

The two pretty, cheerful girls before her were doubtless breaking in this way some liaison, amusing themselves by sending an unexpected blow to some poor fellow, and enjoying themselves by spoiling paper; the one writing, the other reading over her companion’s shoulder and giving vent to merry laughter under her Hungarian toque, a huge Quaker-collar almost covering her shoulders and her little jacket with its large steel buttons.

This feminine head-gear made Marianne think of Guy.  Her eyes, catlike in expression, gleamed maliciously.

She took some paper and essayed to frame some tempting, tender phrases, something nebulous and exciting, but she could not.

“What I would like to write him is that he is a wretch and that I hate him!” she thought.

Then she stopped and looked about her, altogether forgetting Vaudrey.

The contrast between that silent reading-room and the many-colored crowd in that Oriental bazaar, whose murmurs reached her ears like the roaring of a distant sea, and of which she could see only the corner clearly defined by the framework of the doors, amused Marianne, who with a smile on her lips, enjoyed the mischievous delight of fooling a President of the Council.

“At least that avenges me for the cowardice that the other forced me to commit!”

Then mechanically regarding the crowd that flowed through these docks, that contained everything that could please or disgust a whole world at once, the crowd, the clerks, the carpets, the linen, the crowding, the heaping,—­all seemed strange and comic to her, novel and not Parisian, but American and up-to-date.

“Oh! decidedly up-to-date!—­And so convenient!” she said, as she heard the young girls laugh when they finished their love-letters.

Then she began to write, having surely found the expressions she sought.  She sent Rosas a letter of apology:  she would be at his house to-morrow at the same hour.  To-day, her uncle took up her day, compelling her to go to see his paintings, to visit the Louvre, to buy draperies for an Oriental scene that he intended to paint.  If Rosas did not receive the letter in time, it mattered little!  To Lissac,—­and this was the main consideration,—­she intimated that she would call on him the next morning at ten o’clock.

“Rendezvous box!” she said, as she slipped her two letters into the letter-box.  “This extreme comfort is very ironical.”

She smiled as she thought how long it would take to count the number of the little hands, some trembling, some bold, that had slipped into the rectilinear mouth of the letter-box some little missive that was either the foretaste or the postscript of adultery.

Then she went downstairs and rejoined Vaudrey, who was impatiently tapping the floor of the carriage with his foot.