Supposing he turned round and saw her?
If he turned round and saw her and asked her what she was doing there in the street, she would tell him plainly:
"I'm following you, to find out what you do."
But he did not turn.
He went straight forward, deviating at the church, where the crowd became thicker, into the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, and so to the boulevard, which he crossed.
The whole city seemed excited and vivacious.
Cannons boomed in slow succession, and flags were flying.
Sophia had no conception of the significance of those guns, for, though she read a great deal, she never read a newspaper; the idea of opening a newspaper never occurred to her.
But she was accustomed to the feverish atmosphere of Paris.
She had lately seen regiments of cavalry flashing and prancing in the Luxembourg Gardens, and had much admired the fine picture.
She accepted the booming as another expression of the high spirits that had to find vent somehow in this feverish empire.
She so accepted it and forgot it, using all the panorama of the capital as a dim background for her exacerbated egoism.
She was obliged to walk slowly, because Gerald walked slowly.
A beautiful woman, or any woman not positively hag-like or venerable, who walks slowly in the streets of Paris becomes at once the cause of inconvenient desires, as representing the main objective on earth, always transcending in importance politics and affairs.
Just as a true patriotic Englishman cannot be too busy to run after a fox, so a Frenchman is always ready to forsake all in order to follow a woman whom he has never before set eyes on.
Many men thought twice about her, with her romantic Saxon mystery of temperament, and her Parisian clothes; but all refrained from affronting her, not in the least out of respect for the gloom in her face, but from an expert conviction that those rapt eyes were fixed immovably on another male.
She walked unscathed amid the frothing hounds as though protected by a spell.
On the south side of the boulevard, Gerald proceeded down the Rue Montmartre, and then turned suddenly into the Rue Croissant.
Sophia stopped and asked the price of some combs which were exposed outside a little shop.
Then she went on, boldly passing the end of the Rue Croissant.
No shadow of Gerald!
She saw the signs of newspapers all along the street, Le Bien Public, La Presse Libre, La Patrie.
There was a creamery at the corner.
She entered it, asked for a cup of chocolate and sat down.
She wanted to drink coffee, but every doctor had forbidden coffee to her, on account of her attacks of dizziness.
Then, having ordered chocolate, she felt that, on this occasion, when she had need of strength in her great fatigue, only coffee could suffice her, and she changed the order.
She was close to the door, and Gerald could not escape her vigilance if he emerged at that end of the street.
She drank the coffee with greedy satisfaction, and waited in the creamery till she began to feel conspicuous there.
And then Gerald went by the door, within six feet of her.
He turned the corner and continued his descent of the Rue Montmartre.
She paid for her coffee and followed the chase.
Her blood seemed to be up.
Her lips were tightened, and her thought was:
"Wherever he goes, I'll go, and I don't care what happens."
She despised him.
She felt herself above him.
She felt that somehow, since quitting the hotel, he had been gradually growing more and more vile and meet to be exterminated.
She imagined infamies as to the Rue Croissant.
There was no obvious ground for this intensifying of her attitude towards him; it was merely the result of the chase. All that could be definitely charged against him was the smoking of a cigar.
He stepped into a tobacco-shop, and came out with a longer cigar than the first one, a more expensive article, stripped off its collar and lighted it as a millionaire might have lighted it.
This was the man who swore that he did not possess five francs.
She tracked him as far as the Rue de Rivoli, and then lost him.
There were vast surging crowds in the Rue de Rivoli, and much bunting, and soldiers and gesticulatory policemen.
The general effect of the street was that all things were brightly waving in the breeze.
She was caught in the crowd as in the current of a stream, and when she tried to sidle out of it into a square, a row of smiling policemen barred her passage; she was a part of the traffic that they had to regulate.
She drifted till the Louvre came into view.
After all, Gerald had only strolled forth to see the sight of the day, whatever it might be!
She knew not what it was.
She had no curiosity about it.
In the middle of all that thickening mass of humanity, staring with one accord at the vast monument of royal and imperial vanities, she thought, with her characteristic grimness, of the sacrifice of her whole career as a school-teacher for the chance of seeing Gerald once a quarter in the shop.