She got up, crossed the room barefooted, and opened the window; the night outside was not cold; but she could hardly bring herself to imagine that a day must come when it would rain no more. If she had had any money she would have escaped to Paris, gone straight to Jean Azévédo and confided in him; he would know how to get her work. If she could only be a woman alone in Paris, earning her living and dependent on no one...! Oh to be without a family! She would choose _her own people_ as she pleased,--the tie should not be one of blood, but of the mind, and even of the flesh as well; she would discover her true relations, however few and scattered they might be.... She went to sleep at last, with the window open. The cold damp dawn awoke her; her teeth chattered, and she could not bring herself to get up and shut the window,--she could not even put out her arms and draw up the bedclothes. That day she did not get up or even do her hair. She swallowed a few mouthfuls of potted meat and drank some coffee so as to be able to smoke,--tobacco on an empty stomach did not agree with her. She tried to recapture her imaginings of the night; and, indeed, at Argelouse the day was almost as quiet and as dark as the night. In these days, the shortest in the year, time disappears under the pall of rain, and one hour melts into the next; dusk passes into dusk in unalterable silence. But Thérèse had no desire for sleep, and her dreams became more and more vivid; she searched her past methodically for forgotten faces, lips that she had loved from afar, vague forms that casual encounters, or the chances of the night, had brought into contact with her young body. She moulded an image of happiness, invented an imaginary joy, and used all the fragments of her experience to build up an impossible love. “She never gets up now, and she leaves her potted meat and her bread,” said Balionte to Balion some time after this: “but she finishes the bottle fast enough. She’d drink as much as you’d let her have, she would. And then she burns the sheets with her cigarettes. She’ll end by setting the house on fire. She smokes so much that her fingers and nails are all yellow, just as if she’d dipped them in arnica. It’s a shame, so it is!--those sheets were woven at home.... She won’t get clean ones very often, I can tell you.” She added that she was perfectly willing to sweep the room or to make the bed: it was the creature’s fault for pretending to be ill and not getting up. It was not worth Balionte’s trouble, with her swollen legs and all, to carry up jugs of hot water; she found them in the evening standing at the bedroom door where she had put them in the morning. Thérèse’s thoughts began to be less absorbed in the unknown being that she had evoked for her delight; she grew weary of her happiness, and sated with imaginary pleasure, so she conceived another way of escape.