omprehended was that out of this sordid atmosphere--out of the lethargy
of the sultry night--some force had touched him, some force was drawing
him back into the circle of human things. Strange indeed are the
workings of the mind. He, who had shrunk with an agonized sensitiveness
from the sympathy of M. Cartel--from the tender comprehension of the
little Jacqueline--suddenly felt his reserve melt and break in presence
of this woman of the boulevards with her air of impassive _ennui_.
Theoretically, he knew life in all its harder aspects, and it called for
no vivid imagination to trace the descent of the fresh _grisette_ of the
_Quartier Latin_ to the creature who sought her meals in the Cafe des
Cerises-jumelles, yet hers was the accepted compassion.

"Madame!" he said, suddenly. "Madame, tell me! You knew him once?"

Lize wiped the dew of heat from her forehead; emptied a second glass of
wine. "A thousand years ago, _mon petit_, when the world was as young as
you!"

"In the _Quartier_?"

"In the _Quartier_--on the Boul' Mich'--at Bulliers--" She stopped,
falling into a dream; then, suddenly, from the farthest corner of the
room, came the sound of a loud kiss, and the boy and girl at the distant
table began to sing in unison--a ribald song, but instinct with the zest
of life. Lize started, as though she had been struck.

"They have it--youth!" she cried, with a jerk of her head toward the
distant corner. "The world is for them!" Then her voice and her
expression altered. She leaned across the table, until her face was
close to Max.

"What a little fool you are!" she said. "It is written in those eyes of
yours--that see too little and see too much. Go home! Think of what I
have said! He is a good boy--this Blake!"

Max mechanically replenished her glass, and mechanically she drank; then
she produced a little mirror and made good the ravages of the heat upon
her face with the nonchalance of her kind; finally, she looked at the
clock.

"Come!" she said. "We go the same way."

He rose obediently. He made no question as to her destination. He had
come to drown himself in the sordidness of Paris and, behold, his heart
was beating with a human quickness it had not known since the moment he
held Blake's first letter unopened in his hand; his throat was dry, his
eyes were smarting with the old, half-forgotten smart of unshed tears.

He followed her with a strange docility as she passed out of the
unsavory Cerises-jum