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 aspect, as well as affectionately tolerant of her friend's quixoticism.

"You are here often?"

"Every day. I never go to work before midnight."

"Then I shall certainly see you again," said Grover, getting up from the table.

"Au plaisir, Monsieur," said Marthe, giving him her hand with a return of her impersonally polite manner.

The encounter had cheered him strangely, and as he made his way homeward he marvelled once more at the ewige weibliche. In all the women he had known and liked there was that unaccountable, deep, lovely goodness which, while often blind and occasionally complicated by opposing and destructive instincts, seemed to be at the source of all their actions. Why don't I apply a woman to myself, he chided himself querulously, in the slang of Marthe's cafe. He was tired of making excuses for not having a bonne amie. Mme. Choiseul was almost rude to him because of his lack of amorous complications. "Voyons!" she had one day protested, "it's not healthy to be so much alone. Take a little friend: you have only to make a sign and you can have your choice!"

All I need, he reflected, in supreme discontent, is a burning love affair. But life put so many obstacles in one's way. The ones you wanted you couldn't have; the ones you could have didn't tempt you.

In bed with his light turned off he tried to recapture the image of the girl seated on Noémi Janvier's piano,