Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/145

To the Levitan family Monique's departure was like the sudden breaking of a coral necklace; the members that made up the family were scattered, never again to be united on one common thread. The quiet flat on the Avenue Republique breathed its last sigh. Madame Levitan saw to it that the faithful old maid found another position-and on the lovingly-rubbed furniture fell motes of dust which, with no one to disturb it, grew thicker and thicker.

The Levitans, mère and père, no longer drove home after the day's business. Instead they each went a different path, one to the card game, the other to the roulette wheel.

The last link that had held together the Levitan family disintegration, with no one to put out a controlling hand. was now broken, and at once that life tumbled down to disintegration, with no one to put out a controlling hand. Husband and wife now lived in the green memory of their early married life when both of them would push the junk wagon, with noses raised to see whether anyone was signalling from the upper windows.

"We buy old clothes!" both of them would chant, in the traditional manner of the Paris second-hand dealer. "Marchand d'habit, chiffon." Windows would open, high and low sections and in aristocratic neighborhoods. Thousands and thousands of flights of stairs they two had climbed in those years. Mountains of old clothes-and dust-they'd carried on their shoulders, never wearying. Year in, year out, in heat and cold, toiling, toiling, so that the family nest, when it was built, would be warm and snug, safe against storms; and so that the future of their daughter, who was being brought up at a boarding school, would be secure Sparingly they ate and drank, generous only with their labor and their sweat, taking satisfaction in the knowledge that