by French artists. Hadria understood why.
One of the labourers stood watching the train, and she let her eyes rest
on the patient figure till she was carried beyond his little world. If
she could have painted that scene just as she saw it, all the sadness
and mystery of the human lot would have stood forth eloquently in form
and colour; these a magic harmony, not without some inner kinship with
the spirit of man at its noblest.

What was he thinking, that toil-bent peasant, as the train flashed by?
What tragedy or comedy was he playing on his rural stage? Hadria sat
down and shut her eyes, dazzled by the complex mystery and miracle of
life, and almost horrified at the overwhelming thought of the millions
of these obscure human lives burning themselves out, everywhere, at
every instant, like so many altar-candles to the unknown God!

"And each one of them takes himself as seriously as I take myself:
perhaps more seriously. Ah, if one could but pause to smile at one's
tragic moments, or still better, at one's sublime ones. But it can't be
done. A remembrancer would have to be engaged, to prevent lapses into
the sublime,--and how furious one would be when he nudged one, with his
eternal: 'Beware!'"

It was nearly eight o'clock when the train plunged among the myriad
lights of the great city. The brilliant beacon of the Eiffel Tower sat
high up in the sky, like an exile star.

Gaunt and grim was the vast station, with its freezing purplish electric
light. Yet even here, to Hadria's stirred imagination, there was a
certain quality in the Titanic building, which removed it from the
vulgarity of English utilitarian efforts of the same order.

In a fanciful mood, one might imagine a tenth circle of the Inferno,
wherein those stern grey arches should loftily rise, in blind and
endless sequence, limbing an abode of horror, a place of punishment for
those, empty-hearted, who had lived without colour and sunshine, in
voluntary abnegation, caring only for gain and success.

The long delay in the examination of the luggage, the fatigue of the
journey, tended to increase the disposition to regard the echoing
edifice, with its cold hollow reverberations, as a Circle of the Doomed.
It was as if they passed from the realm of the Shades through the Gates
of Life, when at length the cab rattled out of the courtyard of the
station, and turned leftwards into the brilliant streets of Paris. It
was hard to realize that all this stir and