rady Square. . . At seven o'clock I would go to her, wait until she closed, then we went out into the country.
It happened on several occasions that when I arrived, I found people there. Well-dressed young men, with the insolent glances of coxcombs, stood about her, chatting and laughing. Vlasta was beaming. I departed unobserved. When she questioned me afterwards, I told her. She reddened, looked on one side, and explained that it could not be helped, she could not drive customers away.
Then one day I followed her and one of these young men. She closed the kiosk, they linked arms and walked towards her lodging, where they both vanished through the doorway.
The end, the end. . . I went home.
What was the good of all this, I thought to myself. I was torn by a corroding physical pain. Redemption, the return to an honourable life,—what folly. Moral regeneration,—where lay the flaw? Ah, a worm-eaten apple would be sound. The end, the end. . . But after all, I was glad of it. These tiresome walks, these tiresome conversations would cease. My conscience would be relieved of a task for which, properly speaking, I had no strength. I reviewed those days, and it appeared to me that I was clad in the array, not of the hero of a novel, but of a bourgeois moralist. I turned red with anger at the thought of how
