But mostly she was preoccupied with pondering the strangeness of it, that he who seemed so brilliant and brave a figure of the great world should, according to his own confession, have risen from beginnings as lowly as her own. All that he had suffered in the days of his youth, in that place in Paris which he called Troyon’s, Sofia had suffered here and in large part continued to suffer without prospect of alleviation or hope of escape. And remembering what he had said, that his own trials had come to an end only when he awakened to the fact that he was, as he had put it, “less than half alive” there at Troyon’s, and had simply “walked out into life,” she was persuaded that the cure for her own discomfort and discontent would never be found in any other way. But she lacked courage to adventure it.
To say “walk out and make an end of it” was all very well; but assuming that she ever should muster up spirit enough to do it—what then? Which way should she turn, once she had passed out through the doors? What could she do? She had neither means nor friends, and she was much too thoroughly conversant with the common way of the world with a woman alone to imagine that, by taking her life in her own hands, she would accomplish much more than exchange the irk of the frying pan for the fury of the fire.
All the same, she knew that she must one day do it and chance the consequences. Things couldn’t go on as they were.
And even granting that the outcome of any effort at self-assertion must be unhappy, she grew impatient.
Meanwhile, she did nothing, she sat quietly on her perch, looked with stony composure over the heads of the multitude, indifferent alike to admiration and the uncharitable esteem of her own sex, and waited with a burning heart.
Mr. Karslake ran true to form. He drifted in and out casually, always idle and dégagé and elegant, he continued his irregular conferences with ill-assorted companions, he worshipped discreetly and evidently without the faintest hope, he seemed more than ever a trifling and immaterial creature. Chance did not again lead him to the table where he had sat with the man whom Sofia could not forget, and only the memory of that conversation held any place for Karslake in the consideration of the girl.
Even at that she didn’t consider him seriously, she looked for him and missed him when he didn’t appear solely because of a secret hope that some day that other one would come back to meet him in the café.
Why she held fast to that hope Sofia could not have said.
Toward the middle of summer Mr. Karslake absented himself for several weeks, and when he showed up again his visits were fewer and more widely spaced.
On an afternoon late in August, a hot and weary day, he sauntered in with his habitual air of having in particular nothing to do and all the time there was to do it in, and found a man waiting for him.