She saw Chirac with his wistful smile.
She saw him whipped over the roof of the Gare du Nord at the tail of a balloon.
She saw old Niepce.
She felt his lecherous arm round her.
She was as old now as Niepce had been then.
Could she excite lust now?
Ah! the irony of such a question!
To be young and seductive, to be able to kindle a man's eye--that seemed to her the sole thing desirable.
Once she had been so! ... Niepce must certainly have been dead for years.
Niepce, the obstinate and hopeful voluptuary, was nothing but a few bones in a coffin now!
She was acquainted with affliction in that hour.
All that she had previously suffered sank into insignificance by the side of that suffering.
She turned to the veiled window and idly pulled the blind and looked out.
Huge red and yellow cars were swimming in thunder along Deansgate; lorries jolted and rattled; the people of Manchester hurried along the pavements, apparently unconscious that all their doings were vain.
Yesterday he too had been in Deansgate, hungry for life, hating the idea of death!
What a figure he must have made!
Her heart dissolved in pity for him.
She dropped the blind.
"My life has been too terrible!" she thought.
"I wish I was dead.
I have been through too much.
It is monstrous, and I cannot stand it.
I do not want to die, but I wish I was dead."
There was a discreet knock on the door.
"Come in," she said, in a calm, resigned, cheerful voice.
The sound had recalled her with the swiftness of a miracle to the unconquerable dignity of human pride.
Mr. Till Boldero entered.
"I should like you to come downstairs and drink a cup of tea," he said. He was a marvel of tact and good nature.
"My wife is unfortunately not here, and the house is rather at sixes and sevens; but I have sent out for some tea."
She followed him downstairs into the parlour.
He poured out a cup of tea.
"I was forgetting," she said. "I am forbidden tea.
I mustn't drink it."
She looked at the cup, tremendously tempted.
She longed for tea.
An occasional transgression could not harm her.
But no!
She would not drink it.
"Then what can I get you?"
"If I could have just milk and water," she said meekly.
Mr. Boldero emptied the cup into the slop basin, and began to fill it again.
"Did he tell you anything?" she asked, after a considerable silence.
"Nothing," said Mr. Boldero in his low, soothing tones.
"Nothing except that he had come from Liverpool.
Judging from his shoes I should say he must have walked a good bit of the way."
"At his age!" murmured Sophia, touched.
"Yes," sighed Mr. Boldero.
"He must have been in great straits.
You know, he could scarcely talk at all.
By the way, here are his clothes.