She felt hungry, got up, and saw her youthful figure reflected in a tailor’s shop window: her tightly fitting travelling-dress suited her admirably: but her face, with its high cheek-bones and peaked nose, still bore the dreadful traces of those days at Argelouse. “I don’t look old,” she thought. She lunched (as so often in her dreams) in the Rue Royale. Why should she go back to the hotel since she didn’t want to? A warm feeling of satisfaction stole over her, thanks to that half-bottle of Pouilly. She called for cigarettes. A young man, sitting at the next table, handed her his lighter, and she smiled. To think that hardly an hour ago she wanted to plunge, in Bernard’s company, into the dark Villandraut road, between the rows of menacing pines! She cared no more for one country than another, pines or poplars, plain or ocean. Nothing interested her except living creatures, beings of blood and flesh. “It is not the stone-built city that I love, nor lectures nor museums, but the living forest that stirs within it, racked by passions more furious than any storm. The lamentations of the pines of Argelouse, at night, were so strangely moving because they seemed so nearly human.” Thérèse had drunk a little and smoked a great deal; and she smiled to herself like a woman who at last is happy. She made up her cheeks and her lips with great care: and then went out into the street,--to seek what she might find. THE END Transcriber’s Note: Words may have inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged. Obsolete and alternative spellings were left unchanged. Four misspelled words were corrected. Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_. Obvious printing errors, such as partially printed letters and punctuation, were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added.