in.  The eyelids were as if pasted down over the eyes, fitting them like kid.  All the skin was extremely pallid; it seemed brittle.  The body, whose outlines were clear under the sheet, was very small, thin, shrunk, pitiable as the face.  And on the face was a general expression of final fatigue, of tragic and acute exhaustion; such as made Sophia pleased that the fatigue and exhaustion had been assuaged in rest, while all the time she kept thinking to herself horribly:  “Oh! how tired he must have been!”

Sophia then experienced a pure and primitive emotion, uncoloured by any moral or religious quality.  She was not sorry that Gerald had wasted his life, nor that he was a shame to his years and to her.  The manner of his life was of no importance.  What affected her was that he had once been young, and that he had grown old, and was now dead.  That was all.  Youth and vigour had come to that.  Youth and vigour always came to that.  Everything came to that.  He had ill-treated her; he had abandoned her; he had been a devious rascal; but how trivial were such accusations against him!  The whole of her huge and bitter grievance against him fell to pieces and crumbled.  She saw him young, and proud, and strong, as for instance when he had kissed her lying on the bed in that London hotel—­she forgot the name—­in 1866; and now he was old, and worn, and horrible, and dead.  It was the riddle of life that was puzzling and killing her.  By the corner of her eye, reflected in the mirror of a wardrobe near the bed, she glimpsed a tall, forlorn woman, who had once been young and now was old; who had once exulted in abundant strength, and trodden proudly on the neck of circumstance, and now was old.  He and she had once loved and burned and quarrelled in the glittering and scornful pride of youth.  But time had worn them out.  “Yet a little while,” she thought, “and I shall be lying on a bed like that!  And what shall I have lived for?  What is the meaning of it?” The riddle of life itself was killing her, and she seemed to drown in a sea of inexpressible sorrow.

Her memory wandered hopelessly among those past years.  She saw Chirac with his wistful smile.  She saw him whipped over the roof of the Gare du Nord at the tail of a balloon.  She saw old Niepce.  She felt his lecherous arm round her.  She was as old now as Niepce had been then.  Could she excite lust now?  Ah! the irony of such a question!  To be young and seductive, to be able to kindle a man’s eye—­that seemed to her the sole thing desirable.  Once she had been so! ...  Niepce must certainly have been dead for years.  Niepce, the obstinate and hopeful voluptuary, was nothing but a few bones in a coffin now!

She was acquainted with affliction in that hour.  All that she had previously suffered sank into insignificance by the side of that suffering.

She turned to the veiled window and idly pulled the blind and looked out.  Huge red and yellow cars were swimming in thunder along Deansgate; lorries jolted and rattled; the people of Manchester hurried along the pavements, apparently unconscious that all their doings were vain.  Yesterday he too had been in Deansgate, hungry for life, hating the idea of death!  What a figure he must have made!  Her heart dissolved in pity for him.  She dropped the blind.