For a long time she stood there, silent, motionless, her hands clenched at her sides, looking straight before her in the rain. Above her on his pedestal, the great, bronze, naked, tortured man ground his teeth as he glared out from under the inexorable limitations of his ape-like forehead, and strove wildly against the barriers of his flesh….
Wildly and vainly, against inexorable limitations! Sylvia was aware that an insolent young man, with moist protuberant eyes, had come up where she stood there, alone, motionless on the public street. He put his arm in hers, clasped her hand in a fat, soft palm, and, "Allons, ma belle!" he said with a revolting gayety.
Sylvia pulled away from him, cried out fiercely in English, "Don't you dare to touch me!" and darted away.
He made no attempt at pursuit, acknowledging his mistake with an easy shrug and turning off to roam, a dim, predatory figure, along the dusky street. He had startled and frightened the girl so that she was trembling when she ventured to slow down to a walk under the glaring lights of the Boulevard St. Michel. She was also shivering with wet and cold, and without knowing it, she was extremely hungry. As she fled along the boulevard in the direction of her own quarter of the city, her eye caught the lighted clock at the kiosk near Cluny. She was astonished to see that it was after seven o'clock. How long could she have stood there, under the shadow of that terrific Thinker, consumed quite as much as he by the pain of trying to rise above mere nature? An hour—more than an hour, she must have been there. The Pantheon must have closed during that time, and the dreadful, sick man must have passed close by her. Where was he now? What makeshift shelter harbored that cough, those dirty, skeleton hands, those awful eyes which had outlived endurance and come to know peace before death….
She shivered and tried to shrink away from her wet, clinging clothing. She had never, in all her life before, been wet and cold and hungry and frightened, she had never known from what she had been protected. And now the absence of money meant that she must walk miles in the rain before she could reach safety and food. For three cents she could ride. But she had not three cents. How idiotic she had been not to keep a few sous from her purse. What a sickening thing it had been to see him stoop to pick it up after he had tried to have the pride not to touch it. That was what morphine had done for him. And he would buy more morphine with that money, that was the reason he had not been able to let it lie … the man who had been to her little girlhood the radiant embodiment of strength and fineness!
Her teeth were chattering, her feet soaked and cold. She tried to walk faster to warm her blood, and discovered that she was exhausted, tired to the marrow of her bones. Her feet dragged on the pavement, her arms hung heavily by her side, but she dared not stop a moment lest some other man with abhorrent eyes should approach her.
She set her teeth and walked; walked across the Seine without a glance at its misted lights blinking through the rain, walked on past the prison of Marie Antoinette, without a thought of that other harmless woman who had loved bright and lovely things while others suffered: walked on upon the bridge across the Seine again. This bewildered her, making her think that she was so dazed she had doubled on her tracks. She saw, a long way off, a solitary hooded sergent de ville, and dragged herself across an endless expanse of wet asphalt to ask him her way. But just before she reached him, she remembered suddenly that of course she was on the island and was obliged to cross the Seine again before reaching the right bank. She returned weary and disheartened to her path, crossed the bridge, and then endlessly, endlessly, set one heavy foot before the other under the glare of innumerable electric lights staring down on her and on the dismal, wet, and deserted streets. The clocks she passed told her that it was nearly eight o'clock. Then it was past eight. What must they be thinking of her on the Rue de Presbourg? She tried again to hurry, but could force her aching muscles to no more than the plod, plod, plod of her dogged advance over those interminable miles of pavement. There was little of her then that was not cold, weary, wet flesh, suffering all the discomforts that an animal can know. She counted her steps for a long time, and became so stupidly absorbed in this that she made a wrong turning and was blocks out of her way before she noticed her mistake. This mishap reduced her almost to tears, and it was when she was choking them weakly back and setting herself again to the cruel long vista of the Champs-Elysées that an automobile passed her at top speed with a man's face pressed palely to the panes. Almost at once the car stopped in answer to a shouted command; it whirled about and bore down on her. Felix Morrison sprang out and ran to her with outstretched arms, his rich voice ringing through the desolation of the rain and the night—"Sylvia! Sylvia! Are you safe?"
He almost carried her back to the car, lifted her in. There were wraps there, great soft, furry, velvet wraps which he cast about her, murmuring broken ejaculations of emotion, of pity, of relief—"Oh, your hands, how cold! Sylvia, how could you? Here, drink this! I've been insane,—absolutely out of my mind! Let me take off your hat—Oh, your poor feet—I was on my way to—I was afraid you might have—Oh, Sylvia, Sylvia, to have you safe!" She tried to bring to mind something she had intended to remember; she even repeated the phrase over to herself, "It was an ugly, ugly thing to have married Molly," but she knew only that he was tenderness and sheltering care and warmth and food and safety. She drew long quivering breaths like a child coming out of a sobbing fit.
Then before there was time for more thought, the car had whirled them back to the door, where Aunt Victoria, outwardly calm, but very pale, stood between the concierge and his wife, looking out into the rainy deserted street.
At the touch of those warm embracing arms, at that radiant presence, at the sound of that relieved, welcoming voice, the nightmare of the Pantheon faded away to blackness….