streets
in which private motors glittered five deep, and furred and feathered
silhouettes glided from them into tea-rooms, picture-galleries and
jewellers' shops. In some such scenes Susy was no doubt figuring:
slenderer, finer, vivider, than the other images of clay, but imitating
their gestures, chattering their jargon, winding her hand among the same
pearls and sables. He struck away across the Seine, along the quays
to the Cite, the net-work of old Paris, the great grey vaults of St.
Eustache, the swarming streets of the Marais. He gazed at monuments
dawdled before shop-windows, sat in squares and on quays, watching
people bargain, argue, philander, quarrel, work-girls stroll past in
linked bands, beggars whine on the bridges, derelicts doze in the pale
winter sun, mothers in mourning hasten by taking children to school, and
street-walkers beat their weary rounds before the cafes.

The day drifted on. Toward evening he began to grow afraid of his
solitude, and to think of dining at the Nouveau Luxe, or some
other fashionable restaurant where he would be fairly sure to
meet acquaintances, and be carried off to a theatre, a boite or a
dancing-hall. Anything, anything now, to get away from the maddening
round of his thoughts. He felt the same blank fear of solitude as months
ago in Genoa.... Even if he were to run across Susy and Altringham, what
of it? Better get the job over. People had long since ceased to take on
tragedy airs about divorce: dividing couples dined together to the last,
and met afterward in each other's houses, happy in the consciousness
that their respective remarriages had provided two new centres of
entertainment. Yet most of the couples who took their re-matings so
philosophically had doubtless had their hour of enchantment, of belief
in the immortality of loving; whereas he and Susy had simply and frankly
entered into a business contract for their mutual advantage. The fact
gave the last touch of incongruity to his agonies and exaltations, and
made him appear to himself as grotesque and superannuated as the hero of
a romantic novel.

He stood up from a bench on which he had been lounging in the Luxembourg
gardens, and hailed a taxi. Dusk had fallen, and he meant to go back to
his hotel, take a rest, and then go out to dine. But instead, he threw
Susy's address to the driver, and settled down in the cab, resting both
hands on the knob of his umbrella and staring straight ahead of him as
if he