self-surrender. He must certainly go, and yet it was hideously hard. He
compromised and went to Paris to spend the rest of the day. He strolled
along the boulevard and paused sightlessly before the shops, sat a while
in the Tuileries gardens and looked at the shabby unfortunates for whom
this only was nature and summer; but simply felt afresh, as a result of
it all, the dusty dreary lonely world to which Madame de Mauves had
consigned him.

In a sombre mood he made his way back to the centre of motion and sat
down at a table before a cafe door, on the great plain of hot asphalt.
Night arrived, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found
occupants, and Paris began to wear that evening grimace of hers that
seems to tell, in the flare of plate glass and of theatre-doors, the
muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, how this is no world for you
unless you have your pockets lined and your delicacies perverted.
Longmore, however, had neither scruples nor desires; he looked at the
great preoccupied place for the first time with an easy sense of
repaying its indifference. Before long a carriage drove up to the
pavement directly in front of him and remained standing for several
minutes without sign from its occupant. It was one of those neat plain
coupes, drawn by a single powerful horse, in which the flaneur figures a
pale handsome woman buried among silk cushions and yawning as she sees
the gas-lamps glittering in the gutters. At last the door opened and out
stepped Richard de Mauves. He stopped and leaned on the window for some
time, talking in an excited manner to a person within. At last he gave a
nod and the carriage rolled away. He stood swinging his cane and looking
up and down the boulevard, with the air of a man fumbling, as one might
say, the loose change of time. He turned toward the cafe and was
apparently, for want of anything better worth his attention, about to
seat himself at one of the tables when he noticed Longmore. He wavered