Chapter 23

XXIII

AS she fled on toward the lights of the streets a breath of
freedom seemed to blow into her face.

Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last months
had dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick's Susy, and
no one else's. She sped on, staring with bright bewildered eyes
at the stately facades of the La Muette quarter, the
perspectives of bare trees, the awakening glitter of shop-
windows holding out to her all the things she would never again
be able to buy ....

In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner's window, and
said to herself: "Why shouldn't I earn my living by trimming
hats?" She met work-girls streaming out under a doorway, and
scattering to catch trams and omnibuses; and she looked with
newly-wakened interest at their tired independent faces. "Why
shouldn't I earn my living as well as they do?" she thought. A
little farther on she passed a Sister of Charity with softly
trotting feet, a calm anonymous glance, and hands hidden in her
capacious sleeves. Susy looked at her and thought: "Why
shouldn't I be a Sister, and have no money to worry about, and
trot about under a white coif helping poor people?"

All these strangers on whom she smiled in passing, and glanced
back at enviously, were free from the necessities that enslaved
her, and would not have known what she meant if she had told
them that she must have so much money for her dresses, so much
for her cigarettes, so much for bridge and cabs and tips, and
all kinds of extras, and that at that moment she ought to be
hurrying back to a dinner at the British Embassy, where her
permanent right to such luxuries was to be solemnly recognized
and ratified.

The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with
stifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, drawing long
panting breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowly
and aimlessly, she began to saunter along a street of small
private houses in damp gardens that led to the Avenue du Bois.
She sat down on a bench. Not far off, the Arc de Triomphe
raised its august bulk, and beyond it a river of lights streamed
down toward Paris, and the stir of the city's heart-beats
troubled the quiet in her bosom. But not for long. She seemed
to be looking at it all from the other side of the grave; and as
she got up and wandered down the Champs Elysees, half empty in
the evening lull between dusk and dinner, she felt as if the
glittering avenue were really changed into the Field of Shadows
from which it takes its name, and as if she were a ghost among
ghosts.

Halfway home, a weakness of loneliness overcame her, and she
seated herself under the trees near the Rond Point. Lines of
motors and