And Humphrey in the Paris office distilled a column a day from the forty columns that the French Special Correspondents sent to their papers, while Dagneau, up at the Ministry of the Interior, garnered facts and official communiqués.
Work was his salvation and his solace. Everything of the past was wiped away from his mind when Humphrey worked. The personal things affecting his own private life became trivial beside the urgent importance of keeping The Day well-informed. And thus habit had fortified his power of resistance to external matters that might have disturbed a mind less trained to make itself subservient to the larger issue of duty. In a week—a brief week—he had gone through every phase of sorrow, anger, self-pity at his rejection. He thought of writing—indeed, he went so far one night as to compose a letter imploring Elizabeth for forgiveness, promising everything she wished ... but, when it was written, he tore it into little pieces. A mood of futile oaths followed. He felt that he had been balked of her by trickery. It led to violent hatred of her cold austerity, her icy splendour. He put away the thought of her from him. After all, what did it matter? They would never have been happy together. Always she was above him, distant and unattainable ... yet those fine moments, when she had stooped down and lifted him up, when gold and brilliance took the place of the dross in his mind! How she filled him with dreams of overwhelming possibilities, of ennobling achievements.... Below the crust of the selfishness and vanity of his life, there was a rich vein of good and strong desire ready to be worked, if she had only known. There were moments when his whole soul ached with an intense longing to be exalted and free from the impoverished squalor of its surroundings. He knew it, and the thought of it made him unjust to Elizabeth. She had not known of those constant conflicts which endured over years that seemed everlasting,—a guerrilla warfare with conscience.
They had not mattered. She had given his soul back to him, to do as he liked with it; she had forsaken him before he was strong enough to stand alone....
The telephone bell rang. He adjusted the metal band over his head. "Londres," said the voice of the operator. His ears heard nothing but the voice of The Day calling to him; his eyes saw nothing but the sheets of writing at his side, and everything else faded from his mind but the news of the night....
He put the receiver down, and almost immediately the telephone bell rang, and he heard a voice telling him that it was Charnac.... "Where have you been?" asked Charnac. "One has missed you." Humphrey explained his absence.
"Can you come to supper to-night," Charnac called. "Your little Desirée will be there." His voice came out of the depths of space, calling Humphrey to the gaiety of life. "Your little Desirée...." It brought to him, vividly, her thin, supple figure; those strange blue eyes that looked widely from beneath the pale eyebrows; and the lips of cherry-red. The song that she had sung that night had been lilting ever since in his mind:
"... Je perds la tête
'Suis comme une bête."