He ran down and told the porter that she was certainly in the room.  He had had a letter from her and feared a terrible accident.  He suggested breaking open the door.  The porter, who had been sullen and disinclined to listen, became alarmed; he could not take the responsibility of breaking into the room; they must go for the commissaire de police.  They walked together to the bureau, and then they fetched a locksmith.  Philip found that Miss Price had not paid the last quarter’s rent:  on New Year’s Day she had not given the concierge the present which old-established custom led him to regard as a right.  The four of them went upstairs, and they knocked again at the door.  There was no reply.  The locksmith set to work, and at last they entered the room.  Philip gave a cry and instinctively covered his eyes with his hands.  The wretched woman was hanging with a rope round her neck, which she had tied to a hook in the ceiling fixed by some previous tenant to hold up the curtains of the bed.  She had moved her own little bed out of the way and had stood on a chair, which had been kicked away.  It was lying on its side on the floor.  They cut her down.  The body was quite cold.

XLIX

The story which Philip made out in one way and another was terrible.  One of the grievances of the women-students was that Fanny Price would never share their gay meals in restaurants, and the reason was obvious:  she had been oppressed by dire poverty.  He remembered the luncheon they had eaten together when first he came to Paris and the ghoulish appetite which had disgusted him:  he realised now that she ate in that manner because she was ravenous.  The concierge told him what her food had consisted of.  A bottle of milk was left for her every day and she brought in her own loaf of bread; she ate half the loaf and drank half the milk at mid-day when she came back from the school, and consumed the rest in the evening.  It was the same day after day.  Philip thought with anguish of what she must have endured.  She had never given anyone to understand that she was poorer than the rest, but it was clear that her money had been coming to an end, and at last she could not afford to come any more to the studio.  The little room was almost bare of furniture, and there were no other clothes than the shabby brown dress she had always worn.  Philip searched among her things for the address of some friend with whom he could communicate.  He found a piece of paper on which his own name was written a score of times.  It gave him a peculiar shock.  He supposed it was true that she had loved him; he thought of the emaciated body, in the brown dress, hanging from the nail in the ceiling; and he shuddered.  But if she had cared for him why did she not let him help her?  He would so gladly have done all he could.  He felt remorseful because he had refused to see that she looked upon him with any particular feeling, and now these words in her letter were infinitely pathetic:  I can’t bear the thought that anyone else should touch me.  She had died of starvation.