Page:Possession (1926).pdf/468

 At last, after she had been in Paris for weeks, she rang up the house and learning from Victorine that it was empty and that no one was expected (Thérèse was in London, Victorine told her, and Richard and Ellen still in Tunis) she arranged to call for the things late that afternoon. 

T was a cold gray afternoon in the spring when the sun, breaking through the clouds, picked out for brief moments the faint green on the trees of the little park in the Avenue du Bois. Side by side the white houses stood, withdrawn a little from the street, flamboyant yet cold, ornate but barren. Sabine, watching them from the window of her tiny motor, was thankful again in a comfortable indefinite fashion that she had escaped from their insufferable pomp into the tiny, exquisite house in the Rue Tilsit.

Of late she had come at times to forget all the secret misery of the twelve years; she had been almost happy, as nearly happy as it was possible for her to be. It seemed to her now that circumstances had been cruel. She should have been born a man; and as a man, with a freedom from all the world of Mrs. Champion and her Virgins, she would have turned her mind to science. It was that sort of a mind; and it was only recently that she had come to believe it wasted. . . frittered away on tiny, nonsensical things, things which in the end only ate into her own chance for happiness. In all her life there had been nothing which had taken possession of her—nothing save the barren, futile passion for her husband. Her life, she reflected, had been a wasted one. As a man, she would have been free. . . free in the same fashion as Ellen Tolliver. She could have done as she liked, waiting upon no one. It seemed to her that her whole life had been spent in going from place to place, always in a tiny, expensive motor, arriving nowhere in the end. She was neither one thing nor the