transfiguring colour. He found the
"domicile" that very day: a tawdrily furnished rez-de-chaussee,
obviously destined to far different uses. And as he sat there, after the
concierge had discreetly withdrawn with the first quarter's payment in
her pocket, and stared about him at the vulgar plushy place, he burst
out laughing at what it was about to figure in the eyes of the law: a
Home, and a Home desecrated by his own act! The Home in which he and
Susy had reared their precarious bliss, and seen it crumble at the
brutal touch of his unfaithfulness and his cruelty--for he had been told
that he must be cruel to her as well as unfaithful! He looked at the
walls hung with sentimental photogravures, at the shiny bronze "nudes,"
the moth-eaten animal-skins and the bedizened bed-and once more the
unreality, the impossibility, of all that was happening to him entered
like a drug into his veins.

To rouse himself he stood up, turned the key on the hideous place, and
returned to his lawyer's. He knew that in the hard dry atmosphere of the
office the act of giving the address of the flat would restore some kind
of reality to the phantasmal transaction. And with wonder he watched the
lawyer, as a matter of course, pencil the street and the number on one
of the papers enclosed in a folder on which his own name was elaborately
engrossed.

As he took leave it occurred to him to ask where Susy was living. At
least he imagined that it had just occurred to him, and that he was
making the enquiry merely as a measure of precaution, in order to know
what quarter of Paris to avoid; but in reality the question had been on
his lips since he had first entered the office, and lurking in his mind
since he had emerged from the railway station that morning. The fact
of not knowing where she lived made the whole of Paris a meaningless
unintelligible place, as useless to him as the face of a huge clock that
has lost its hour hand.

The address in Passy surprised him: he had imagined that she would be
somewhere in the neighborhood of the Champs Elysees or the Place de
l'Etoile. But probably either Mrs. Melrose or Ellie Vanderlyn had taken
a house at Passy. Well--it was something of a relief to know that she
was so far off. No business called him to that almost suburban region
beyond the Trocadero, and there was much less chance of meeting her than
if she had been in the centre of Paris.

All day he wandered, avoiding the fashionable quarters, the