g out the tables. He flung himself into a chair.

"Waiter, an absinthe."

CHAPTER VI

In the cab, beyond the fortifications, which were skirted by the
deserted boulevard, Felicie and Robert held one another in a close
embrace.

"Don't you love your own Felicie? Tell me! Doesn't it flatter your
vanity to possess a little woman who makes people cheer and clap her,
who is written about in the newspapers? Mamma pastes all my notices in
her album. The album is full already."

He replied that he had not waited for her to succeed before discovering
how charming she was; and, in fact, their liaison had begun when she was
making an obscure first appearance at the Odeon in a revival which had
fallen flat.

"When you told me that you wanted me, I didn't keep you waiting, did I?
We didn't take long about that! Wasn't I right? You are too sensible to
think badly of me because I didn't keep things dragging along. When I
saw you for the first time I felt that I was to be yours, so it wasn't
worth while delaying. I don't regret it. Do you?"

The cab stopped at a short distance from the fortifications, in front
of a garden railing.

This railing, which had not been painted for a long time, stood on a
wall faced with pebbles, low and broad enough to permit of children
perching themselves on it. It was screened half-way up by a sheet of
iron with a toothed edge, and its rusty spikes did not rise more than
ten feet above the ground. In the centre, between two pillars of masonry
surmounted by cast-iron vases, the railing formed a gate opening in the
middle, filled in across its lower part, and furnished, on the inside,
with worm-eaten slatted shutters.

They alighted from the cab. The trees of the boulevard, in four straight
lines, lifted their frail skeletons in the fog. They heard, through the
wide silence, the diminishing rattle of their cab, on its way back to
the barrier, and the trotting of a horse coming from Paris.

"How dismal the country is!" she said, with a shiver.

"But, my darling, the Boulevard de Villiers is not the country."

He could not open the gate, and the lock creaked. Irritated by the
sound, she said:

"Open it, do: the noise is getting on my nerves."

She noticed that the cab which had come from Paris had stopped near
their house, at about the tenth tree from where she stood; she looked at
the thin, steaming horse and the shabby driver, and asked:

"What is that carriage?"

"It's a cab,