ripped from his
frayed trousers over the rotting leather of his shoes. As she looked,
he began to cough, loudly, terribly, so that the echoing reaches of
the great nave resounded to the sound. Sylvia ran back to him and
thrust her purse into his hand. At first he could not speak, for
coughing, but in a moment he found breath to ask, "Is it Victoria's
money?"

She did not answer.

He held it for a moment, and then opening his hand let it drop. As she
turned away Sylvia heard it fall clinking on the stone floor. At the
door she turned for one last look, and saw him weakly stooping to pick
it up again. She fairly burst out of the door.

It was almost dusk when she was on the street again, looking down the
steep incline to the Luxembourg Gardens. In the rainy twilight the
fierce tension of the Rodin "Thinker" in front of the Pantheon loomed
huge and tragic. She gave it a glance of startled sympathy. She had
never understood the statue before. Now she was a prey to those same
ravaging throes. There was for the moment no escaping them. She felt
none of her former wild impulse to run away. What she had been running
away from had overtaken her. She faced it now, looked at it squarely,
gave it her ear for the first time; the grinding, dissonant note under
the rich harmony of the life she had known for all these past months,
the obscure vaults underlying the shining temple in which she had been
living.

What beauty could there be which was founded on such an action as
Felix' marriage to Molly--Molly, whose passionate directness had known
the only way out of the impasse into which Felix should never have let
her go?... An echo from what she had heard in the mass at Notre Dame
rang in her ears, and now the sound was louder--Austin's voice,
Austin's words: "A beauty that can't endure disharmony in conduct, the
fine true ear for the deeper values, the foundations--" It was Austin,
asking himself what beauty could be in any life founded, even remotely
as his was, on any one's misery?

For a long time she stood there, silent, motionless, her hands
clenched at her sides, looking straight before her in the rain. Above
her on his pedestal, the great, bronze, naked, tortured man ground his
teeth as he glared out from under the inexorable limitations of his
ape-like forehead, and strove wildly against the barriers of his
flesh....

Wildly and vainly, against inexorable limitations! Sylvia was aware
that an insolent young man, with