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that, if he called for her at half past two, he might hear great news. He answered with a bubble of joy which she took as proof of his good nature, his readiness to rejoice in the pleasures of a friend as if they were his own, until he had rung off. Then she realized that he had thought she meant she was going to promise to marry him. She sat and stared at the telephone aghast. She would not have exposed him to such humiliation for anything in the world. But she did not see how she could ring him up and make the matter plain without a degree of indelicacy which, in this already sullied day, she felt reluctant to undertake. Besides, the morning was getting on, and she had arranged to have a manicure and a face massage, as an anticipatory rite of purification for the disorderly act she was to commit later in the day.
    At half past twelve she took André’s roses in her hand and looked at herself in her long mirror, not that she needed reassurance of her beauty, which had ceased to be relevant to any serious purpose of her life, since by now Laurence must have received some final impression of her appearance. What she needed was to recognize herself as the person she knew, who she had been all her life, who was incapable of being forced to make a scene by the pressure of passion. She waited till it was nearly twenty-five to one, to make quite certain that André would be out, for though he ought to allow a full half-hour to get to Versailles for that lunch, he would perhaps not hurry, since his hosts were not French. Then she went down to her automobile, and told the chauffeur to drive to André’s house. As the car travelled up the Champs-Elysées she looked ahead at the Arc de Triomphe, raising against the whitish spring sky a shape appropriate less to architecture than to furniture, as if it were a wardrobe storing the idea of French military grandeur, and she childishly attributed her troubles to her residence in a country where life stamped itself in such spectacular forms. Then she knew the vertiginous pain of a patient who is going to a nursing home for an operation which is not strictly necessary, which is undergone solely as a precaution against future crises; she wanted to stop the automobile, jump out, to take the chance that some other way of ridding herself of André would present itself. Perhaps her Uncle Honoré would come to France this summer, and would be able to suggest something. It was well known that that old man understood everything. But when the automobile slewed off the Champs-Elysées into the avenue whose trees marched down to the Seine, she remembered how often, and with what feelings of humiliation, she had forced herself against her will to make this journey during the last few weeks. She picked up the roses she had let fall on her lap, and held them tightly.
    “When will Madame want me again?” asked the chauffeur.
    “Oh, at once, at once!” she said gaily, and went forward to her deed.
    Decidedly, part of her trouble had been merely that she was in France, for nowhere else in the whole world would there have been this courtyard. She had liked coming here, and since it had an air of liking to be visited by happy lovers, she had humoured it. Yes, that accounted for at least part of the trouble. She passed through the archway, and sniffed as always the antique pungency of the concierge’s meal, seething in a pot that had no doubt never been emptied and filled afresh since Paris was Lutetia, that might have begun its simmering in even earlier and sterner times, so that the basic flavour still carried a trace of tender prehistoric child. She was peered at as always by the concierge’s wife, pressing against the dimness of her window her drooping bosom and features congested by malevolence; how realist are the French to keep at their doorways a perpetual reminder that the body of man is corruptible and his nature fundamentally evil. Then she entered into the courtyard itself, into the tender