XXIV
With his miniature leather brief-case in his hand Richard Diver walked from the seventh arrondisement, where he left a note for Maria Wallis signed ‘Dicole,’ the word with which he and Nicole had signed communications in the first days of love, to his shirt-makers where the clerks made a fuss over him out of proportion to the money he spent. Ashamed at promising so much to these poor Englishmen, with his fine manners, his air of having the key to security, ashamed of making a tailor shift an inch of silk on his arm. Afterward he went to the bar of the Crillon and drank a small coffee and two fingers of gin.
As he entered the hotel the halls had seemed unnaturally bright; when he left he realized that it was because it had already turned dark outside. It was a windy four-o’clock nigh
