It was the road through Senlis and Chantilly.
The trainers had the race-horses out at exercise in the misty forest roads.
I thought, "There can't be war."
Luzarches and Ecouen, and St. Denis and then Paris.
I got out of the car on the boulevards. There were many people out and I went with the swing of the crowd up and down. It was good to be in the swing of a crowd. People hurried and people dallied; people stood and looked into shop windows; people sat and sipped things on café terraces; people pushed and elbowed; people stopped and stood where they were, reading the noon papers; strangers spoke to one another, if the swing of the crowd threw them for an instant together; everybody looked at one another with a queer new sudden need of each the other, and they all felt, more or less, one thing together.
After a while I went to my own home.
I thought I had never seen the Place de la Concorde more beautiful, oval and white, or crossed the bridge with a deeper sense of going home.
My own little Place was very quiet, all the big houses closed; nobody left but the sentinels before the Palace and the concierges in their doorways with their cats and canaries.
Our concierges and I were more glad even than usual to see one another. Old Boudet in his habitual shirt-sleeves, feeling, evidently, particularly socialistic, was yet quite tolerant of me; and sweet, slow, fat, very respectable mother Boudet, whose gentleness always seems begging one to excuse shirt-sleeves and politics, was so ready to cry that I kissed her.