“I can rig that up somewhere. There is the shelter in the kitchen.”
She looked horrified.
“But you cannot sleep there.”
“Why not?”
“You will be frozen.”
Brent laughed.
“I was a soldier for four years. It will be better than the fire-step of a freezing trench. Now—what about this factory?”
As they walked along the little Rue Romaine, Brent discovered another Manon, a Manon who kept stopping to look at some wreck of a house, a Manon whose brown eyes were full of pity. She forgot the Café de la Victoire for a moment and lost herself in the tragedy of these obscure little cottages, and in looking through their broken nakedness at the weedy gardens that showed behind them. Rain had pulped the fallen plaster. There was a darkness, a slime about these ruins, a sense of pollution. Manon’s face seemed to have aged. The irresponsible buoyancy had disappeared from the adventure and she left the childhood of the day behind her in passing through the Rue Romaine.
“O mon ami, my heart bleeds.”
She passed in front of a cottage in which a picture of the Sacré Cœur still hung from a wall that had not fallen. “Grandmère Vitry lived here. Do you see the picture—and the tiled floor all covered with rubbish? She was so proud of her cottage—and whenever I looked in, Grandmère seemed to be polishing that floor.”