nd by brutally familiar hands.

She tried to go away; she insulted herself inwardly; she called herself
a cowardly wretch; she swore to herself that each turn should be the
last, that she would go as far as a certain tree, and that was all; if
he had not returned, she would go away and put an end to the whole
thing. But she did not go; she walked on and on; she waited, more
consumed than ever, the longer he delayed, with the mad desire to see
him.

At last, as the hours flew by and the boulevard became empty, Germinie,
exhausted, overdone with weariness, would approach the houses. She would
loiter from shop to shop, she would go mechanically where gas was still
burning, and stand stupidly in the bright glare from the shop windows.
She welcomed the dazzling light in her eyes, she tried to allay her
impatience by benumbing it. The objects to be seen through the
perspiring windows of the wine-shops--the cooking utensils, the bowls of
punch flanked by two empty bottles with sprigs of laurel protruding from
their necks, the show-cases in which the liquors combined their varied
colors in a single beam, a cup filled with plated spoons--these things
would hold her attention for a long while. She would read the old
announcements of lottery drawings placarded on the walls of a saloon,
the advertisements of _gloria_--coffee with brandy--the inscriptions in
yellow letters: _New wine, pure blood, 70 centimes._ For a whole quarter
of an hour she would stand staring into a back room containing a man in
a blouse sitting on a stool by a table, a stove-pipe, a slate, and two
black tea-boards against the wall. Her fixed, vacant stare would rest,
through the reddish mist, upon the dark forms of shoemakers leaning over
their benches. It fell and lingered heedlessly upon a counter that was
being washed, upon hands that were counting the receipts of the day,
upon a tunnel or jug that was being scoured with sandstone. She had
ceased to think. She would simply stand there, nailed to the spot and
growing weaker and weaker, feeling her courage vanish from the mere
weariness of standing on her feet, seeing things only through a sort of
film as in a swoon, hearing the noise made by the muddy cabs rolling
over the wet pavements only as a buzzing in her ears, ready to fall and
compelled again and again to lean against the wall for support.

In her then condition of prostration and illness, with that
semi-hallucination of vertigo that made her so ti