“To Paris. In the middle of summer. It is not gay. Everyone will know _qu'il via plantée là_. But one must live. Ah! you are happy, you other honest women!” She talked on, in half-cynical, half-artless confidence, as is the way of her race, forgetting in her need of expansion that her hearer was the English girl well brought up. She dilated on her present trouble, her life in Paris, her creditors, the spitefulness of women, the brutality of men. Clytie listened with mingled feelings of horror and pity. She was so young, this girl, so fresh for all the soil of Paris, and yet taking, from use, the whole horror of her life as a matter of course, realising it only in rare emotional moments. Here was a rejecter of formulas, of a race that has thrown off convention ever since Rahab harboured the spies! Too fragile, delicate she looked for this social warfare. Whither was she tending? Clytie had a supreme, lurid moment of introspection. Only two or three such come in a lifetime. At last the girl rose from the sofa in the quick French way. “Forgive me, mademoiselle, for talking like this. I had forgotten. You see well that you could not have helped me otherwise than you have done by sitting by my side. I must not encroach upon your time. Adieu, mademoiselle, and thank you; oh, a thousand times, thanks. I shall not forget you.” She was going. Clytie rose and went towards her, her face a little flushed, but kindness in her eyes. “You will shake hands, _à l'Anglaise?_” she said. The girl looked her quickly in the face, and then impulsively seized the proffered hand in both hers and kissed it twice rapidly. Then she ran from the room. Clytie went back to her seat by the window and looked out upon the market-sellers. But she did not see much, as tears stood in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She did not tell Mrs. Farquharson of this incident, but kept it in her heart as a secret and strange revelation of life--something precious, mysterious, awful. During her drive with the others in the afternoon she was strangely silent. Kent rallied her on her depression in his bluff, kind-hearted manner. She smiled absently, complained of a headache, then shivered with a wave of recollection. For days the spectre haunted her, sometimes looking at her through the light blue eyes of the girl, and sometimes taking a dual form, in which the coarse drudge features of the mother of Jack, the model, were dimly visible. And a question hummed in her ears: “Was this the aspect of life that men kept so jealously hidden from women?”