And to put petty facts, in accordance with one of his favourite maxims, between himself and his grief, he had hastened his journey to England. During the years of his cruelly idle and empty life, he had done his best to beguile weariness by cosmopolitan wanderings. He had thus formed three or four social centres for himself through Europe. In London, especially, he had a life ready made, rooms in Bolton Street, off Piccadilly, two clubs in which to find hospitality, and twenty houses in which to be received as a friend. But this year, when settled as usual in the three furnished apartments reserved for him, he felt incapable of entering immediately upon the whirl of society. "I will leave my cards in a few days," he said to himself. The few days passed by, and he had the same repugnance to seeing his acquaintances again. He allowed a week to glide away in this manner, two weeks, three, and he continued to experience an unconquerable aversion to all conversation and all friendly meeting, to all things and all persons. He went so far as to walk only in the evening, the more surely to evade the human face. If he went out in daylight, it was to take one of those two-wheeled cabs, the driver of which is perched high up behind, and the horse in which trots so quickly. Without an object, he had himself driven at random through the interminable streets of the huge city. Small, dark houses succeeded to small, dark houses, squares with railings and miserable trees, open spaces with discoloured statues, and boundless parks with herbage browsed by flocks, opened up at distant intervals. Over the monstrous ant-hill extended the vault of a sooty sky. Sometimes the said sky was wholly drowned in a yellow fog; at other times the mist broke in pelting rain, or else there was a dim, cold azure in which coal-dust seemed to be floating. A population was hurrying along these streets, but Armand did not recognise a single face, and he would go on thus for whole hours, alone with his thought as when he awoke, and dressed, and ate--with that thought which was always present and was always similar to itself. And what was it that was shown him by this fixed and torturing thought? Unceasingly, unceasingly Helen, and the terrible confession during their last interview showed itself in all its details, and he could see the act which she had avowed in terms so pitilessly precise and clear. She was evoked before him in the arms of De Varades; for he told himself that after the first crisis of despair she must have relapsed again, and the vision inflicted upon him a feeling which he again compared to a weight upon his heart, crushing it with sadness.