There were only our two selves of our little company, and to be thus alone with her was not merely like a beginning of intimacy, but also on her part⁠—as though she had come there solely to please me, and in such weather⁠—it seemed to me as touching as if, on one of those days on which she had been invited to a party, she had given it up in order to come to me in the Champs-Élysées; I acquired more confidence in the vitality, in the future of a friendship which could remain so much alive amid the torpor, the solitude, the decay of our surroundings; and while she dropped pellets of snow down my neck, I smiled lovingly at what seemed to me at once a predilection that she showed for me in thus tolerating me as her travelling companion in this new, this wintry land, and a sort of loyalty to me which she preserved through evil times. Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow.