Gently, she drew closer, blushing like a young girl.

‘I always wanted to know what it was like to be … wicked … and actually … it turns out to be not all that much fun …’

She ran from the room, flew down the staircase and flung herself out into the street.

Down it an army of sweepers was sweeping. They swept the pavements and the cobblestones, driving all the litter and filth into the stream of the gutter. With the same regular movement, like reapers in the field, they swept up all in a wide semi-circle ahead. And as she ran through street after street, still they came to meet her, moving like puppets on a string with the same, mechanical, mowing movement. She felt as though something inside her, too, had now been swept away. Through the mud, down to the gutter and finally into the sewer had gone all the refuse of her over-excited imagination.

Returning home, the image of Paris swept inexorably clean by the cold light of day filled her exhausted mind, and as she reached her room, sobs broke from her now quite frozen heart.

A WOMAN’S CONFESSION

My friend, you asked me to tell you what is the most vivid memory I have of my life. Well, since I am now extremely old and have neither children nor any remaining relatives I feel I can quite freely confess something to you. All I ask is that you never reveal my name.

I was often in love and over the years had many admirers. Now that there is no trace of it left I can tell you I was once considered quite a beauty. And it was love that put life into me. It became the air I breathed. I would have sooner died than not be in the heart and mind of someone else every minute of the day. Although some women claim there is never more than one serious love in life, for me it was different. I have often loved someone with such intensity that I thought it would last till the end of time. But these affairs, too, petered out quite naturally, like a fire with no fuel to sustain it.

I shall tell you about the very first of my adventures. I was very much the innocent party in this and it had a strong influence on all my other affairs.

It was that dreadful story in the papers about the revenge taken on that chemist1 which reminded me of an appalling business I was once reluctantly involved in myself.