n a hurry; take the taxi. I want immensely a long
long walk by myself... through the streets, with the lights coming
out...."

He laid his hand on her arm. "I say, my dear, you're not ill?"

"No; I'm not ill. But you may say I am, to-night at the Embassy."

He released her and drew back. "Oh, very well," he answered coldly;
and she understood by his tone that the knot was cut, and that at that
moment he almost hated her. She turned away, hastening down the deserted
alley, flying from him, and knowing, as she fled, that he was still
standing there motionless, staring after her, wounded, humiliated,
uncomprehending. It was neither her fault nor his....

XXIII

AS she fled on toward the lights of the streets a breath of freedom
seemed to blow into her face.

Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last months had
dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick's Susy, and no one else's.
She sped on, staring with bright bewildered eyes at the stately facades
of the La Muette quarter, the perspectives of bare trees, the awakening
glitter of shop-windows holding out to her all the things she would
never again be able to buy....

In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner's window, and said
to herself: "Why shouldn't I earn my living by trimming hats?" She met
work-girls streaming out under a doorway, and scattering to catch trams
and omnibuses; and she looked with newly-wakened interest at their tired
independent faces. "Why shouldn't I earn my living as well as they do?"
she thought. A little farther on she passed a Sister of Charity with
softly trotting feet, a calm anonymous glance, and hands hidden in her
capacious sleeves. Susy looked at her and thought: "Why shouldn't I be
a Sister, and have no money to worry about, and trot about under a white
coif helping poor people?"

All these strangers on whom she smiled in passing, and glanced back at
enviously, were free from the necessities that enslaved her, and would
not have known what she meant if she had told them that she must have
so much money for her dresses, so much for her cigarettes, so much for
bridge and cabs and tips, and all kinds of extras, and that at that
moment she ought to be hurrying back to a dinner at the British Embassy,
where her permanent right to such luxuries was to be solemnly recognized
and ratified.

The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with
stifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, d