She passed a night of physical misery, exasperated by the tireless rattling vitality of the street. She kept saying to herself: "I'm all alone now, and I'm going to be ill. I am ill." She saw herself dying in Paris, and heard the expressions of facile sympathy and idle curiosity drawn forth by the sight of the dead body of this foreign woman in a little Paris hotel. She reached the stage, in the gradual excruciation of her nerves, when she was obliged to concentrate her agonized mind on an intense and painful expectancy of the next new noise, which when it came increased her torture and decreased her strength to support it. She went through all the interminable dilatoriness of the dawn, from the moment when she could scarcely discern the window to the moment when she could read the word 'Bock' on the red circlet of paper which had tossed all night on the sea of the counterpane. She knew she would never sleep again. She could not imagine herself asleep; and then she was startled by a sound that seemed to clash with the rest of her impressions. It was a knocking at the door. With a start she perceived that she must have been asleep.
"Enter," she murmured.
There entered the menial in alpaca. His waxen face showed a morose commiseration. He noiselessly approached the bed--he seemed to have none of the characteristics of a man, but to be a creature infinitely mysterious and aloof from humanity--and held out to Sophia a visiting card in his grey hand.
It was Chirac's card.
"Monsieur asked for monsieur," said the waiter. "And then, as monsieur had gone away he demanded to see madame. He says it is very important."
Her heart jumped, partly in vague alarm, and partly with a sense of relief at this chance of speaking to some one whom she knew. She tried to reflect rationally.
"What time is it?" she inquired.
"Eleven o'clock, madame."
This was surprising. The fact that it was eleven o'clock destroyed the remains of her self-confidence. How could it be eleven o'clock, with the dawn scarcely finished?
"He says it is very important," repeated the waiter, imperturbably and solemnly. "Will madame see him an instant?"
Between resignation and anticipation she said: "Yes."
"It is well, madame," said the waiter, disappearing without a sound.
She sat up and managed to drag her matinee from a chair and put it around her shoulders. Then she sank back from weakness, physical and spiritual. She hated to receive Chirac in a bedroom, and particularly in that bedroom. But the hotel had no public room except the dining-room, which began to be occupied after eleven o'clock. Moreover, she could not possibly get up. Yes, on the whole she was pleased to see Chirac. He was almost her only acquaintance, assuredly the only being whom she could by any stretch of meaning call a friend, in the whole of Europe. Gerald and she had wandered to and fro, skimming always over the real life of nations, and never penetrating into it. There was no place for them, because they had made none. With the exception of Chirac, whom an accident of business had thrown, into Gerald's company years before, they had no social relations. Gerald was not a man to make friends; he did not seem to need friends, or at any rate to feel the want of them. But, as chance had given him Chirac, he maintained the connection whenever they came to Paris. Sophia, of course, had not been able to escape from the solitude imposed by existence in hotels. Since her marriage she had never spoken to a woman in the way of intimacy. But once or twice she had approached intimacy with Chirac, whose wistful admiration for her always aroused into activity her desire to charm.
Preceded by the menial, he came into the room hurriedly, apologetically, with an air of acute anxiety. And as he saw her lying on her back, with flushed features, her hair disarranged, and only the grace of the silk ribbons of her matinee to mitigate the melancholy repulsiveness of her surroundings, that anxiety seemed to deepen.
"Dear madame," he stammered, "all my excuses!" He hastened to the bedside and kissed her hand--a little peek according to his custom. "You are ill?"
"I have my migraine," she said. "You want Gerald?"
"Yes," he said diffidently. "He had promised----"
"He has left me," Sophia interrupted him in her weak and fatigued voice. She closed her eyes as she uttered the words.
"Left you?" He glanced round to be sure that the waiter had retired.
"Quitted me! Abandoned me! Last night!"
"Not possible!" he breathed.
She nodded. She felt intimate with him. Like all secretive persons, she could be suddenly expansive at times.
"It is serious?" he questioned.
"All that is most serious," she replied.
"And you ill! Ah, the wretch! Ah, the wretch! That, for example!" He waved his hat about.
"What is it you want, Chirac?" she demanded, in a confidential tone.
"Eh, well," said Chira............