She did not give up, however. Partly faithful, partly merely obstinate, she stuck to her furtive prowling, keeping ever closer to the well-known Restaurant “à la Paysanne Flamande.” She knew her Georges. A thousand accidents might take him into this or that street, by rail or car, on horseback or on foot, but, between noon and two o’clock, there was no possible error, Georges would be sitting before the best-laid table he could find, napkin tucked into his buttonhole, saying he had the hunger of a wolf, making caustic fun of the bill of fare, and standing no nonsense with the waiter. The celebrated restaurant, entirely a creation of the War, before which it had led a struggling existence dependent on a billiard-table and a mixed clientèle, presented a glass swing-door between two large plate-glass windows, protected by round iron tables and chairs set among desolate shrubs in boxes. The door opened into a little-used café-lounge; the eating-room had replaced the billiard-table on the raised portion of the floor up four steps at the back. Thus the public in the street could see the legs and half the bodies of the diners, but not their faces. Outside, a great sign-board, swung English-fashion on a bracket, depicted an alleged Flemish peasant-woman, in national costume, with international features, and the immemorial vulgarity of such efforts. Madeleine never even guessed that the square of brilliant paint was an allegorical representation of herself, and would have been much astonished to have been told so. Two o’clock struck, and half-past, and suddenly she had a physical qualm. What was it? She realized she was faint with hunger. Together with the bodily emptiness and dizziness, there rose in her a bitter wave of disgust and disillusionment. For the second time she set her teeth. She would not stand it. Careless of the fact that she was doing what was only done by women of a sort she despised, because she considered they were driving a dangerous, badly paid trade, she pushed open the door, walked steadily into the café, and sat down just as the tables were beginning to go round. It was partly want of food, as she told herself, but partly, if she had admitted it, the moisture of desperate vexation in her eyes. She ordered a café crême of an unwilling waiter, who did not want French people there, in such a way that he brought it, at once, and properly done. The scalding sips soon revived her. She began to think, if thinking it can be called. Rather she just sat and felt. She felt the French equivalents of “I’m fed up with this”--“I’m going to put an end to it”--whatever It exactly was. Then less articulately she just felt sore. It was not in her to feel passively sore, but how to express her feeling by activity she could not see, at the moment. * * * * *