She grimaced, looked very serious; said, “Je ne sais pas, vous savez!” with several vigorous, yet rhythmical and rich, forward movements of the head. She became the broker: Kreisler was pressing for a sum in excess of regulations. Not for the world, any more than had she been the broker in fact, would she have valued it at a penny over what it seemed likely to fetch. “Je ne sais pas, vous savez!” she repeated. She looked even worried. She would have liked to please Kreisler by saying more, but her business conscience prevented her. “Well, we’ll go together.” This conversation was carried on strictly in dialect. Suzanne understood him, for she was largely responsible for the lingo in which Kreisler carried on conversation with the French. This young woman had no fixed occupation. She disappeared for periods to live with men. She sat as a model. “Your father hasn’t sent yet?” He shook his head. “Le cochon!” she stuttered. “But it will come to-morrow, or the day after, anyway.” The idiosyncrasies of these monthly letters were quite familiar to her. The dress-clothes had been pawned by her on a former occasion. “What do you need twenty francs for?” “I must have, not twenty, but twenty-five.” Her silence was as eloquent as face-muscles and eye-fluid could make it. “To get the dress-clothes out,” he explained, fixing her stolidly with his eye. She first smiled slowly, then allowed her ready mirth to grow, by mechanical stages, into laughter. The presence of this small, indifferent, and mercenary acquaintance irritated him. But he remained cool. Just then a church clock began striking. He foreboded it was already ten, but not later. It struck ten and then eleven. He leapt the hour—the clock seemed rushing with him, in a second, to the more advanced hour—without any flurry, quite calmly. Then it struck twelve. He at once absorbed that further hour as he had the former. He lived an hour as easily and carelessly as he would have lived a second. Could it have gone on striking he would have swallowed, without turning a hair, twenty, thirty strokes! Going out with Suzanne, he turned the key carefully in the door. The concierge or landlord might slip in and fire his things out in his absence. The portmanteau, whisked up from the floor, flopped along with him like a child’s slack balloon. He frowned at Suzanne and, prepared for surprises, went warily down the stairs.