A young man came to her threshold one morning and looked in eagerly; he would speak with Margot Lagoux: but “Is that Margot Lagoux?” he asked, a curious look coming over his face,--that woman, obese, with low brows, huge fat eyelids, round bare forehead, short, strained and corded neck enormously thick, yellowed teeth irregularly shown between thick, sallowed lips, cheeks wrinkled, flecked and blotched with brown like spotted peaches. “No!” he said, hastily, shrinking away. “That is not the woman I mean. The woman I meant was comely ... and had a beautiful daughter named Gabrielle!” He turned away, shuddering. She wore old rags for robes, an old _freloche_ upon her head, in nowise restraining the unkempt coils of her hair hanging matted upon her neck. Her cheeks hung slack and dark and dingy; her lusterless locks were felted into a tangled web that had grown gray with lint; her frowsy chin was stained as with walnut hulls. She was falling apart like an old house with nobody living in it, swore black oaths with a foul mouth, cursed all who crossed her path, ate like a beast food fit for beasts, her fevered sun of glory set,--gone, gone, gone. Down she went, like the stuffs in her shop, from _velours ras_ to _coton croisé_, down, down to oblivion, down to the dusty corner of death. She spat in the dirt: “_Je m’en fiche!_” she said. * * * * * She hated a priest, and never knelt at a confessional again. She did not die in the great house where she had passed the days of her power; every place she dwelt in sank into decay, the swifter where its integrity seemed permanent and secure; nothing purged the ambiguous spell which dragged them down together to the dust. The great house stood a ruin above a ruined court, a wreck of its former pride and splendor, black and foul; the fountain had fallen long ago, its pipes strangled and eaten away to crusts of lead and thready ribs of iron in the sand. Lilac lane was gone; there was no lane there any more, and had been none for years; there was no trace of where it ran, its hedge-rows or its gardens, or of Margot’s cottage other than a mouldering heap of broken brick, bleak rafters of the fallen roof, and one stark, fallen gable; of Gabrielle’s garden nothing remained. Margot died in a dirty hovel in an unkempt alleyway, in the midst of a negro quarter, where, if one beat a drum or caused an instrument of an orchestra to sound, the people swarmed from the tenements like ants out of a hill. The place was fallen and foul, and filled with beggary; and that is the end of a tenement; for beggars are like distemper, the place where they have lived is hard to cure. All the houses in the alley were filthy; but none was filthy as hers.