In the street, Therese felt suddenly that she was alone in the world, without joy and without pain.  She returned to her house on foot, as was her habit.  It was night; the air was frozen, clear, and tranquil.  But the avenues through which she walked, in shadows studded with lights, enveloped her with that mild atmosphere of the queen of cities, so agreeable to its inhabitants, which makes itself felt even in the cold of winter.  She walked between the lines of huts and old houses, remains of the field-days of Auteuil, which tall houses interrupted here and there.  These small shops, these monotonous windows, were nothing to her.  Yet she felt that she was under the mysterious spell of the friendship of inanimate things; and it seemed to her that the stones, the doors of houses, the lights behind the windowpanes, looked kindly upon her.  She was alone, and she wished to be alone.  The steps she was taking between the two houses wherein her habits were almost equal, the steps she had taken so often, to-day seemed to her irrevocable.  Why?  What had that day brought?  Not exactly a quarrel.  And yet the words spoken that day had left a subtle, strange, persistent sting, which would never leave her.  What had happened?  Nothing.  And that nothing had effaced everything.  She had a sort of obscure certainty that she would never return to that room which had so recently enclosed the most secret and dearest phases of her life.  She had loved Robert with the seriousness of a necessary joy.  Made to be loved, and very reasonable, she had not lost in the abandonment of herself that instinct of reflection, that necessity for security, which was so strong in her.  She had not chosen:  one seldom chooses.  She had not allowed herself to be taken at random and by surprise.  She had done what she had wished to do, as much as one ever does what one wishes to do in such cases.  She had nothing to regret.  He had been to her what it was his duty to be.  She felt, in spite of everything, that all was at an end.  She thought, with dry sadness, that three years of her life had been given to an honest man who had loved her and whom she had loved.  “For I loved him.  I must have loved him in order to give myself to him.”  But she could not feel again the sentiments of early days, the movements of her mind when she had yielded.  She recalled small and insignificant circumstances:  the flowers on the wall-paper and the pictures in the room.  She recalled the words, a little ridiculous and almost touching, that he had said to her.  But it seemed to her that the adventure had occurred to another woman, to a stranger whom she did not like and whom she hardly understood.  And what had happened only a moment ago seemed far distant now.  The room, the lilacs in the crystal vase, the little cup of Bohemian glass where she found her pins—­she saw all these things as if through a window that one passes in the street.  She was without bitterness, and even without sadness.  She had nothing to forgive, alas!