Each was heavily shuttered, the
shutters as gray as the walls. The town had been evacuated during the
first Battle of the Marne and only the poor had returned. The well-to-do
provincials in this street had had homes elsewhere, perhaps a flat in
Paris; or they had established themselves in the south.
The street had an intensely secretive air, brooding, waiting. Soon all
these houses would be reopened, the dull calm life of a provincial town
would flow again, the only difference being that the women who went in and
out of those narrow doors and down this long and twisted street would
wear black; but for the most part they would sit in their gardens behind,
secluded from every eye, as indifferent to their neighbors as of old, with
that ingrained unchangeable bourgeois suspicion and exclusiveness; and the
facades, the street itself, would look little less secretive than now.
II
Nowhere could she find such seclusion if she wished for it. This house was
the only one in the street that belonged to a member of the noblesse, and
the bourgeoisie had as little "use" for the noblesse as the noblesse for
the bourgeoisie.
For the moment Alexina felt that the house was hers, and the street itself.
She was literally its only inhabitant. As she stood looking up and down
its misty grayness she felt more peaceful than she had felt for many days.
There were certain fierce terrible emotions that she never wanted to feel
again, and one of them was ruthlessness.
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