ut her
lonely destiny. A haphazard biscuit tossed from his window might fall
upon the very roof that sheltered her: he might search for a hundred
years and never cross her path.

He wondered....

More practically he reminded himself not to forget to write to Mrs.
Pettit. He must try to get the name of the firm of private detectives
she had employed, and her permission to pump them; it might help him, to
learn the quarters wherein they had failed.

And he must make an early opportunity to question Drummond more closely;
not that he anticipated that Drummond knew anything more than he had
already disclosed--anything really helpful at all events.

His thoughts shifted to dwell temporarily on the two personalities newly
introduced into his cosmos, strikingly new, in spite of the fact that
they had been so well known to him of old. He wondered if it were
possible that he seemed to them as singularly metamorphosed as they
seemed to him--superficially if not integrally. He had lost altogether
the trick of thinking in their grooves, and yet they seemed very human
to him. He thought they supplemented one another somewhat weirdly: each
was at bottom what the other seemed to be. Beneath his assumption, for
purposes of revenue only, of outrageous eccentricities, Jules Max was as
bourgeois as Cesar Birotteau; beneath his assumption of the
steady-going, keen, alert and conservative man of affairs, Drummond was
as romantic as D'Artagnan. But Max had this advantage of Drummond: he
was not his own dupe; whereas Drummond would go to his grave believing
himself bored to extinction by the commonplaceness of his fantastical
self....

Irresponsibly, his reverie reembraced the memory he had of the woman who
alone held the key to his matrimonial entanglement. The business bound
his imagination with an ineluctable fascination. No matter how far his
thoughts wandered, they were sure to return to beat themselves to
weariness against that hard-faced mystery, like moths bewitched by the
light behind a clouded window-glass. It was very curious (he thought)
that he could be so indifferent and so interested at one and the same
time. The possibility that she might have married a second time did not
disturb his pulse by the least fraction of a beat. He even contemplated
the chance that she might be dead with normal equanimity. Fortunate,
that he didn't love her. More fortunate still, that he loved no one
else.

It occurred to him suddenly that i