agreeable.

That which she had not divined in her solitude, notwithstanding vague
yearnings and apparently causeless sadness, he had revealed to her. She
knew herself when she knew him. It was a happy astonishment. Their
sympathies were not in their minds. Her inclination toward him was simple
and frank, and at this moment she found pleasure in the idea of meeting
him the next day in the little apartment where they had met for three
years. With a shake of the head and a shrug of her shoulders, coarser
than one would have expected from this exquisite woman, sitting alone by
the dying fire, she said to herself: "There! I need love!"

CHAPTER II

"ONE CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE YOUNG!"

It was no longer daylight when they came out of the little apartment in
the Rue Spontini. Robert Le Menil made a sign to a coachman, and entered
the carriage with Therese. Close together, they rolled among the vague
shadows, cut by sudden lights, through the ghostly city, having in their
minds only sweet and vanishing impressions while everything around them
seemed confused and fleeting.

The carriage approached the Pont-Neuf. They stepped out. A dry cold made
vivid the sombre January weather. Under her veil Therese joyfully inhaled
the wind which swept on the hardened soil a dust white as salt. She was
glad to wander freely among unknown things. She liked to see the stony
landscape which the clearness of the air made distinct; to walk quickly
and firmly on the quay where the trees displayed the black tracery of
their branches on the horizon reddened by the smoke of the city; to look
at the Seine. In the sky the first stars appeared.

"One would think that the wind would put them out," she said.

He observed, too, that they scintillated a great deal. He did not think
it was a sign of rain, as the peasants believe. He had observed, on the
contrary, that nine times in ten the scintillation of stars was an augury
of fine weather.

Near the little bridge they found old iron-shops lighted by smoky lamps.
She ran into them. She turned a corner and went into a shop in which
queer stuffs were hanging. Behind the dirty panes a lighted candle showed
pots, porcelain vases, a clarinet, and a bride's wreath.

He did not understand what pleasure she found in her search.

"These shops are full of vermin. What can you find interesting in them?"

"Everything. I think of the poor bride whose wreath is under that globe.
The dinner occurred at Mail