“I didn't mean to say that,” she said in a gentle, tired voice. “You know, I'm not a very nice person.” The greenish glow of the lamp lit up the contour of one of her cheeks as she tilted her head up, and glimmered in her eyes. A soft sentimental sadness suddenly took hold of Andrews; he felt as he used to feel when, as a very small child, his mother used to tell him Br' Rabbit stories, and he would feel himself drifting helplessly on the stream of her soft voice, narrating, drifting towards something unknown and very sad, which he could not help. They started walking again, past the Pont Neuf, towards the glare of the Place St. Michel. Three names had come into Andrews's head, “Arsinoe, Berenike, Artemisia.” For a little while he puzzled over them, and then he remembered that Genevieve Rod had the large eyes and the wide, smooth forehead and the firm little lips the women had in the portraits that were sewn on the mummy cases in the Fayum. But those patrician women of Alexandria had not had chestnut hair with a glimpse of burnished copper in it; they might have dyed it, though! “Why are you laughing?” asked Jeanne. “Because things are so silly.” “Perhaps you mean people are silly,” she said, looking up at him out of the corners of her eyes. “You're right.” They walked in silence till they reached Andrews's door. “You go up first and see that there's no one there,” said Jeanne in a business-like tone. Andrews's hands were cold. He felt his heart thumping while he climbed the stairs. The room was empty. A fire was ready to light in the small fireplace. Andrews hastily tidied up the table and kicked under the bed some soiled clothes that lay in a heap in a corner. A thought came to him: how like his performances in his room at college when he had heard that a relative was coming to see him. He tiptoed downstairs. “Bien. Tu peux venir, Jeanne,” he said. She sat down rather stiffly in the straight-backed armchair beside the fire. “How pretty the fire is,” she said. “Jeanne, I think I'm crazily in love with you,” said Andrews in an excited voice. “Like at the Opera Comique.” She shrugged her shoulders. “The room's nice,” she said. “Oh, but, what a big bed!” “You're the first woman who's been up here in my time, Jeanne.... Oh, but this uniform is frightful.” Andrews thought suddenly of all the tingling bodies constrained into the rigid attitudes of automatons in uniforms like this one; of all the hideous farce of making men into machines. Oh, if some gesture of his could only free them all for life and freedom and joy. The thought drowned everything else for the moment. “But you pulled a button off,” cried Jeanne laughing hysterically. “I'll just have to sew it on again.” “Never mind. If you knew how I hated them.” “What white skin you have, like a woman's. I suppose that's because you are blond,” said Jeanne.