But this obstinate instinct held her back.
"I do not say, now," Chirac went on.
"Let me hope."
The Latin theatricality of his gestures and his tone made her sorrowful for him.
"My poor Chirac!" she plaintively murmured, and began to put on her gloves.
"I shall hope!" he persisted.
She pursed her lips.
He seized her violently by the waist.
She drew her face away from his, firmly.
She was not hard, not angry now.
Disconcerted by her compassion, he loosed her.
"My poor Chirac," she said,
"I ought not to have come.
I must go.
It is perfectly useless.
Believe me."
"No, no!" he whispered fiercely.
She stood up and the abrupt movement pushed the table gratingly across the floor.
The throbbing spell of the flesh was snapped like a stretched string, and the scene over.
The landlord, roused from his doze, stumbled in.
Chirac had nothing but the bill as a reward for his pains.
He was baffled.
They left the restaurant, silently, with a foolish air.
Dusk was falling on the mournful streets, and the lamp-lighters were lighting the miserable oil lamps that had replaced gas.
They two, and the lamplighters, and an omnibus were alone in the streets.
The gloom was awful; it was desolating.
The universal silence seemed to be the silence of despair.
Steeped in woe, Sophia thought wearily upon the hopeless problem of existence. For it seemed to her that she and Chirac had created this woe out of nothing, and yet it was an incurable woe!
CHAPTER VII
SUCCESS
I
Sophia lay awake one night in the room lately quitted by Carlier.
That silent negation of individuality had come and gone, and left scarcely any record of himself either in his room or in the memories of those who had surrounded his existence in the house.
Sophia had decided to descend from the sixth floor, partly because the temptation of a large room, after months in a cubicle, was rather strong; but more because of late she had been obliged to barricade the door of the cubicle with a chest of drawers, owing to the propensities of a new tenant of the sixth floor.
It was useless to complain to the concierge; the sole effective argument was the chest of drawers, and even that was frailer than Sophia could have wished.
Hence, finally, her retreat.
She heard the front-door of the flat open; then it was shut with nervous violence.
The resonance of its closing would have certainly wakened less accomplished sleepers than M. Niepce and his friend, whose snores continued with undisturbed regularity.
After a pause of shuffling, a match was struck, and feet crept across the corridor with the most exaggerated precautions against noise.
There followed the unintentional bang of another door.
It was decidedly the entry of a man without the slightest natural aptitude for furtive irruptions.
The clock in M. Niepce's room, which the grocer had persuaded to exact time-keeping, chimed three with its delicate ting.
For several days past Chirac had been mysteriously engaged very late at the bureaux of the Debats.
No one knew the nature of his employment; he said nothing, except to inform Sophia that he would continue to come home about three o'clock until further notice.
She had insisted on leaving in his room the materials and apparatus for a light meal.
Naturally he had protested, with the irrational obstinacy of a physically weak man who sticks to it that he can defy the laws of nature.
But he had protested in vain.
His general conduct since Christmas Day had frightened Sophia, in spite of her tendency to stifle facile alarms at their birth.
He had eaten scarcely anything at all, and he went about with the face of a man dying of a broken heart.
The change in him was indeed tragic.