She was obliged to walk slowly, because Gerald walked slowly.  A beautiful woman, or any woman not positively hag-like or venerable, who walks slowly in the streets of Paris becomes at once the cause of inconvenient desires, as representing the main objective on earth, always transcending in importance politics and affairs.  Just as a true patriotic Englishman cannot be too busy to run after a fox, so a Frenchman is always ready to forsake all in order to follow a woman whom he has never before set eyes on.  Many men thought twice about her, with her romantic Saxon mystery of temperament, and her Parisian clothes; but all refrained from affronting her, not in the least out of respect for the gloom in her face, but from an expert conviction that those rapt eyes were fixed immovably on another male.  She walked unscathed amid the frothing hounds as though protected by a spell.

On the south side of the boulevard, Gerald proceeded down the Rue Montmartre, and then turned suddenly into the Rue Croissant.  Sophia stopped and asked the price of some combs which were exposed outside a little shop.  Then she went on, boldly passing the end of the Rue Croissant.  No shadow of Gerald!  She saw the signs of newspapers all along the street, Le Bien Public, La Presse Libre, La Patrie.  There was a creamery at the corner.  She entered it, asked for a cup of chocolate and sat down.  She wanted to drink coffee, but every doctor had forbidden coffee to her, on account of her attacks of dizziness.  Then, having ordered chocolate, she felt that, on this occasion, when she had need of strength in her great fatigue, only coffee could suffice her, and she changed the order.  She was close to the door, and Gerald could not escape her vigilance if he emerged at that end of the street.  She drank the coffee with greedy satisfaction, and waited in the creamery till she began to feel conspicuous there.  And then Gerald went by the door, within six feet of her.  He turned the corner and continued his descent of the Rue Montmartre.  She paid for her coffee and followed the chase.  Her blood seemed to be up.  Her lips were tightened, and her thought was:  “Wherever he goes, I’ll go, and I don’t care what happens.”  She despised him.  She felt herself above him.  She felt that somehow, since quitting the hotel, he had been gradually growing more and more vile and meet to be exterminated.  She imagined infamies as to the Rue Croissant.  There was no obvious ground for this intensifying of her attitude towards him; it was merely the result of the chase.  All that could be definitely charged against him was the smoking of a cigar.

He stepped into a tobacco-shop, and came out with a longer cigar than the first one, a more expensive article, stripped off its collar and lighted it as a millionaire might have lighted it.  This was the man who swore that he did not possess five francs.