She looked at him helplessly, penetrated by the despairing sense of their inaccessibility to each other. Then she remembered that Nick, during their last talk together, had seemed as inaccessible, and wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other’s vision. She would have liked to say this to Streff--but he would not have understood it either. The sense of loneliness once more enveloped her, and she groped in vain for a word that should reach him. “Let me go home alone, won’t you?” she appealed to him. “Alone?” She nodded. “To-morrow--to-morrow....” He tried, rather valiantly, to smile. “Hang to-morrow! Whatever is wrong, it needn’t prevent my seeing you home.” He glanced toward the taxi that awaited them at the end of the deserted drive. “No, please. You’re in a hurry; take the taxi. I want immensely a long long walk by myself... through the streets, with the lights coming out....” He laid his hand on her arm. “I say, my dear, you’re not ill?” “No; I’m not ill. But you may say I am, to-night at the Embassy.” He released her and drew back. “Oh, very well,” he answered coldly; and she understood by his tone that the knot was cut, and that at that moment he almost hated her. She turned away, hastening down the deserted alley, flying from him, and knowing, as she fled, that he was still standing there motionless, staring after her, wounded, humiliated, uncomprehending. It was neither her fault nor his.... XXIII. AS she fled on toward the lights of the streets a breath of freedom seemed to blow into her face. Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last months had dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick’s Susy, and no one else’s. She sped on, staring with bright bewildered eyes at the stately facades of the La Muette quarter, the perspectives of bare trees, the awakening glitter of shop-windows holding out to her all the things she would never again be able to buy.... In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner’s window, and said to herself: “Why shouldn’t I earn my living by trimming hats?” She met work-girls streaming out under a doorway, and scattering to catch trams and omnibuses; and she looked with newly-wakened interest at their tired independent faces. “Why shouldn’t I earn my living as well as they do?” she thought. A little farther on she passed a Sister of Charity with softly trotting feet, a calm anonymous glance, and hands hidden in her capacious sleeves. Susy looked at her and thought: “Why shouldn’t I be a Sister, and have no money to worry about, and trot about under a white coif helping poor people?”