se up
to him, blushing like as if she had been a virgin, and said: "I wanted
to know ... what ... what vice ... really was, ... and ... well ...
well, it is not at all funny."

And she ran out of the room, and downstairs into the street.

A number of sweepers were busy in the streets, brushing the pavements,
the roadway, and sweeping everything on one side. With the same regular
motion, the motion of mowers in a meadow, they pushed the mud in front
of them in a semi-circle, and she met them in every street, like dancing
puppets, walking automatically with their swaying motion. And it seemed
to her as if something had been swept out of her; as if her over-excited
dreams had been pushed into the gutter, or into the drain, and so she
went home, out of breath, and very cold, and all that she could remember
was the sensation of the motion of those brooms sweeping the streets of
Paris in the early morning.

As soon as she got into her room, she threw herself onto her bed and
cried.

MADAME BAPTISTE

When I went into the waiting-room at the station at Loubain, the first
thing I did was to look at the clock, and I found that I had two hours
and ten minutes to wait for the Paris express.

I felt suddenly tired, as if I had walked twenty miles, and then I
looked about me as if I could find some means of killing the time on the
station walls, and at last I went out again, and stopped outside the
gates of the station, racking my brains to find something to do. The
street, which was a kind of a boulevard, planted with acacias, between
two rows of houses of unequal shape and different styles of
architecture, houses such as one only sees in a small town, ascended a
slight hill, and at the extreme end of it, there were some trees, as if
it ended in a park.

From time to time, a cat crossed the street, and jumped over the
gutters, carefully. A cur sniffed at every tree, and hunted for
fragments from the kitchens, but I did not see a single human being, and
I felt listless and disheartened. What could I do with myself? I was
already thinking of the inevitable and interminable visit to the small
_cafe_ at the railway station, where I should have to sit over a glass
of undrinkable beer and the illegible newspaper, when I saw a funeral
procession coming out of a side street into the one in which I was, and
the sight of the hearse was a relief to me. It would, at any rate, give
me something to do for ten minutes. Suddenly, h