Arsenio wore his most characteristic grin. I could not help smiling at it. Lucinda laughed openly. Godfrey, caught unawares as he was, carried the position off bravely.
“Delightful to see you both! But where am I? Whose charming room is this?”
“It’s the devil and all to know that! We live so funnily,” said Monkey Valdez.
CHAPTER XXI
PARTIE CARRÉE
WHEN I awoke the next morning, it was with the memory of one of the queerest hours that I had ever spent in my life. After I had drunk my coffee, I lay late in bed, reviewing it, smiling over Arsenio’s malicious gayety, over Godfrey’s surly puzzlement, over myself struggling between amusement and disgust, over Lucinda’s delicate aloofness and assumed unconsciousness of anything peculiar in the situation.
For the devil and all—to use his own phrase—took possession of Monkey Valdez. Lucinda was not the only one to whom the infliction of pain and punishment might become a joy. Arsenio had been powerless to prevent Godfrey from coming to Venice; he meant to make him pay for having come; to make him pay, I suppose, for having sought to take advantage of Arsenio’s need, for having dared to think that he could buy Lucinda—from a husband who all but told him that he was willing to sell her! Great crimes in the eyes of Arsenio, now no more in need, now grown rich, yet with his riches turned to useless dross, because of him, and of them, Lucinda would have nothing.