shout: '_You've_ brought me to this, Carlotta!' And the
profound injustice of that cry tainted even the sad sweetness of my
immense sorrow. To this day, whenever I hear it, as I do still, my inmost
soul protests, and all the excuses which my love found for him seem
inadequate and unconvincing. I was a broken creature. (How few know what
it means to be broken--to sink under a tremendous and overwhelming
calamity! And yet who but they can understandingly sympathize with the
afflicted?) As for my friends, I did not give them the occasion to desert
me; I deserted them. For the second time in my career I tore myself up by
the roots. I lived the nomad's life, in the usual European haunts of the
nomad. And in five years I did not make a single new friend, scarcely an
acquaintance. I lived in myself and on myself, nursing grief, nursing a
rancour against fate, nursing an involuntary shame.... You know, the
scandal of which I had been the centre was appalling; it touched the
extreme. It must have nearly killed the excellent Mrs. Sardis. I did not
dare to produce another novel. But after a year or so I turned to poetry,
and I must admit that my poetry was accepted. But it was not enough to
prevent me from withering--from shrivelling. I lost ground, and I was
still losing it. I was becoming sinister, warped, peculiar, capricious,
unaccountable. I guessed it then; I see it clearly now.

The house of the odious concierge was in a small, shabby street off the
Boulevard du Montparnasse. I looked in vain for a cab. Even on the wide,
straight, gas-lit boulevard there was not a cab, and I wondered why I had
been so foolish as to dismiss the one in which I had arrived. The great,
glittering electric cars floated horizontally along in swift succession,
but they meant nothing to me; I knew not whence they came nor whither
they went. I doubt if I had ever been in a tram-car. Without a cab I was
as helpless and as timid as a young girl, I who was thirty-one, and had
travelled and lived and suffered! Never had I been alone in the streets
of a large city at night. And the September night was sultry and
forbidding. I was afraid--I was afraid of the men who passed me, staring
at me. One man spoke to me, and I literally shook with fear as I hastened
on. What would I have given to have had the once faithful Yvonne by my
side! Presently I came to the crossing of the Boulevard Raspail, and this
boulevard, equally long, uncharitable, and mournful with