“Quel type!” she exclaimed to herself, nearly as the concierge had done. She sauntered back home, giving Kreisler the benefit of several sour reflections. In a little room situated behind the Rue de la Gaieté, she pulled open one of two drawers in her washstand, which contained a little bread, tea, potatoes, and a piece of cold fish. She spread out a sheet of the _Petit Parisian_ beside the basin. Having peeled the potatoes and put them on the gas, she took off those outdoor things that just enabled her to impart a turkey-like movement to her person. Then, dumpy, in a salmon-check petticoat, her legs bowed backwards and her stomach stuck out, she stood moodily at the window. A man she knew, now in the Midi, sent her now and then a few francs. This rueful spot, struck in image of this elementary dross of humanity, was Kreisler’s occasional haunt. Cell of the unwieldy, tragic brain of the city, with million other similar cells, representing overwhelming uniform force of brooding in that brain, attracted him like a desert or ocean. He would listen solemnly, like a great judge, to Suzanne’s perpetual complaints, sitting on the edge of her bed, hat on head. She was so humble and so pretentious. Her imagination was arrogant and constantly complaining. The form her complaints took was always that of lies—needless, dismal lies. She could not grumble without inventing and she never stopped grumbling. This, then, was one of Kreisler’s dwellings. He lived at large. Some of his rooms, such as this, the Café de Berne, and Juan Soler’s School of Art, he shared with others. On very troubled days his body, like the finger of a weather-glass, would move erratically. When found in Suzanne’s room it might be taken as an indication of an unsettled state. A tendency to remain at home, on the contrary, denoted mostly a state of equilibrium and peace. CHAPTER VIII The portmanteau fell under the bed; he crushed into the red bulbous cover. Kreisler never sat on his bed except when going to get into it. For another man it would have replaced the absent armchair. In those moments of depression in which he did so he always, at once, felt more depressed, or quite hopeless. Head between hands, he now stared at the floor. Four or five hours! He must raise money, else he could not go to the dance. How absurd, this fuss about such a sum! All the same, how the devil could he get it? “Small as it is, I shan’t get it,” he thought to himself. He began repeating this stupidly, and stuck at word “shan’t.” His brain and mouth clogged up, he stuttered thickly in his mind. He sprang up. But the slovenly, hopeless quality of the bed clung to him. This was a frivolous demonstration. He wandered to the window; stood staring out, nose flattened against the pane. The sudden quiet and idleness of his personality was an awakening after the little nightmare of Suzanne. But it was not a refreshing one.