Sylvia took the daisy of brilliants set round a topaz, and the swallow of sapphires--all that Queenie had kept after her disastrous expulsion from Russia--and visited the chief local jeweler, who shrugged his shoulders and refused to buy them. "But at least you can lend me twenty francs upon them until to-morrow," Sylvia urged. He shrugged his shoulders again and bent over to pick at the inside of a watch with that maddening indifference of the unwilling purchaser. Sylvia could not bring herself to believe in his refusal and suggested a loan of fifteen francs. Nothing answered her except the ticking of a dozen clocks and the scraping of a small file. There was a smell of drought in the shop that seemed to symbolize the personality of its owner. "Ten francs?" Sylvia begged. The jeweler looked up slowly from his work and regarded her with a fishy eye, the fishiness of which was many times magnified by the glass that occupied it. He raised his chin in a cold negative and bent over his work more intently. Every clock in the shop told a different time and ticked away more loudly than ever. Sylvia gathered up the trinkets and went away. She tried two other jewelers without success, and she even proposed the loan to a chemist who had a pleasant exterior; finally she had to go back to the hotel without obtaining the money. The day dragged itself along; not even _War and Peace_ could outlast it, and Sylvia wondered why she had never grasped before how much of life radiated from lunch, the absence of which dislocated time itself. Toward six o'clock she came to a sudden resolution, and, going out into the square, she began to sing outside the café. Four lean dogs came and barked; a waiter told her that the singing was not required. Somebody threw a stone at one of the dogs and cut open its leg; whereupon the other three set upon it, until it broke away and fled howling across the square, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. The drinkers outside the café looked at Sylvia over the tops of their newspapers, until she went back to the hotel. Such a retirement would ordinarily have made her hot with shame; but she was already hardened by the first pangs of hunger and had only a savage contempt for the people who had thought to humiliate her; she had not been hungry long enough to feel the pathos of a broken spirit; after all, she had only missed her lunch. Dinner consisted of two stale chocolate creams that were found in a pocket of one of Queenie's jackets; even the bits of silver paper adhering to them seemed to possess a nutritive value. "But we cannot be going on like this," Queenie protested. "There must be some way of raising money enough to get to Bucharest," Sylvia insisted. "There must be. There must be. If we really starve, the police will send us there to avoid a death in this cursed hole of a town." "We must ask that gentleman to tea with us to-morrow," Queenie declared, as she put out the light.