fatuous devil--was it my old familiar demon?--put it into my
heart to say: "So you haven't been worrying, dear, about me?"

"About you!" she cried. "Good God, no! What does it matter about you--or
me! This generation's done for, Ambo. Only the children count now--the
children. We must save them--all of them--somehow. It's up to them--to
Jimmy's son with the rest! They've got to wipe us out, clear the slate
of us and all our insanities! They've got to pass over the wreck of us
and rebuild a happy, intelligible world!"

She rose, seized my arm, and summoning all her strength thrust me from
her toward the door....

VI

It was well on toward three o'clock in the morning when at last I stood
before the black, close-shuttered shop-front of the Vve. Guyot. I was
desperately weary, having of necessity walked all the way. It was, as I
had fully realized while almost stumbling along toward my goal, a crazy
errand. I should find a dark, silent house, and I should then stumble
back through dark, silent streets to my dark, silent hotel. The shop of
the Widow Guyot was a very little shop on a very narrow street, a mere
slit between high, ancient buildings--a slit filled now with the dense
river-mist that shrouds from the experience of Parisians all the
renewing wonders of clear-eyed dawn. The moon had set, or else hung too
veiled and low for this pestilent alley; in spite of a thick military
overcoat I shivered with cold; the flat, sour smell of ill-flushed
gutters caught at my throat. To this abomination of desolation I had,
with no little difficulty, found my way. Thank God I could turn now,
with a good conscience, and fumble back to the warm oblivion of bed.

I paused a moment, however, to draw up the collar of my overcoat to my
ears and fasten it securely; and, doing so, I was aware of the scrape
and clink of metal on metal; then the shop-door right before me was
shaken and jarred open from within. The fluttering rays of a candle,
tremulously held, surprised and for an instant blinded me; faintly
luminous green and red balloons wheeled swiftly in contracting circles,
then coalesced to a flickering point of light. The candle was held by an
old, stout woman with a loose-jowled, bruised-looking face; a face
somehow sensual and hard in spite of its bloated antiquity. A shrunken,
thin-bearded man in a long black coat stood beside her, holding a black
hand-bag. The two were conversing in tones deliberately muted, but broke
off a