f proposing
anything to any one: capable too of thinking it likely Mr. French
would come, for he had never on her previous proposals declined
anything. Yes, she would keep it up to the end, this pretence of owing
them salvation, and might even live to take comfort in having done for
them what they wanted. What they wanted _couldn't_ but be to get at
the Frenches, and what Miss Lindeck above all wanted, baffled of it
otherwise, with so many others of the baffled, was to get at Mr.
French--for all Mr. French would want of either of them!--still more
than Murray did. It was not till after she had got home, got straight
into her own room and flung herself on her face, that she yielded to
the full taste of the bitterness of missing a connection, missing the
man himself, with power to create such a social appetite, such a grab
at what might be gained by them. He could make people, even people
like these two and whom there were still other people to envy, he
could make them push and snatch and scramble like that--and then
remain as incapable of taking her from the hands of such patrons as of
receiving her straight, say, from those of Mrs. Drack. It was a high
note, too, of Julia's wonderful composition that, even in the long,
lonely moan of her conviction of her now certain ruin, all this grim
lucidity, the perfect clearance of passion, but made her supremely
proud of him.

A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT

_Robert Louis Stevenson_ (1850-1894)

It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous,
relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered
it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after
flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous,
interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it
seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had
propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was
it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus, or were the holy
angels moulting? He was only a poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as
the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture
to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the
company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honor of the
jest and the grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his
own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when
he was Villon's age.

The air was raw and poi