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