The cab which was carrying Madame Worms-Clavelin into Paris passed through the Porte Maillot between the gratings crowned in civic style with a hedge of pike-heads. Near these lay dusty custom-house officers and sunburnt flower-girls asleep in the sun. As it passed, it left, on the right, the Avenue de la Révolte, where low, mouldy, red-bedaubed inns and stunted arbours face the Chapel of Saint-Ferdinand, which crouches, lonely and dwarfish, on the edge of a gloomy military moat covered with sickly patches of scorched grass. Thence it emerged into the melancholy Rue de Chartres, with its everlasting pall of dust from the stone-cutting yards, and passed down it into the beautiful shady roads that open into the royal park, now cut up into small, middle-class estates. As the cab rumbled heavily along the causeway down an avenue of plane-trees, every second or so, through the silent solitude, there passed lightly-clad bicyclists who skimmed by with bent backs and heads cutting the air like quick-moving animals. With their rapid flight and long, swift, bird-like movements, they were almost graceful through sheer ease, almost beautiful by the mere amplitude of the curves they described. Between the bordering tree-trunks Madame Worms-Clavelin could see lawns, little ponds, steps, and glass-door canopies in the most correct taste, cut off by rows of palings. Then she lost herself in a vague dream of how, in her old age, she would live in a house like those whose fresh plaster and slate she could see through the leaves. She was a sensible woman and moderate in her desires, so that now she felt a dawning love of fowls and rabbits rising in her breast. Here and there, in the larger avenues, big buildings stood out, chapels, schools, asylums, hospitals, an Anglican church with its gables of stern Gothic, religious houses, severely peaceful in appearance, with a cross on the gate and a very black bell against the wall and, hanging down, the chain by which to ring it. Then the cab plunged into the low-lying, deserted region of market-gardens, where the glass roofs of hot-houses glittered at the end of narrow, sandy paths, or where the eye was caught by the sudden appearance of one of those ridiculous summer-houses that country builders delight to construct, or by the trunks of dead trees imitated in stoneware by an ingenious maker of garden ornaments. In this Bas-Neuilly district one can feel the freshness of the river hard by. Vapours rise there from a soil that is still damp with the waters which covered it, up to quite a late period, according to the geologists—exhalations from marshes on which the wind bent the reeds scarcely a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago.