"She's dead," said Sylvia abruptly.
He took this in with a nod of the head. "So much the better for her. How did it happen that you didn't fall for Morrison's …" he looked at her sharply at a change in her face she could not control. "Oh, you did," he commented slackly. "Well, you'd better start home for La Chance tonight," he said again.
They were circling around and around the shadowy interior, making no pretense of looking at the frescoed walls, to examine which had been their ostensible purpose in entering. Sylvia was indeed aware of great pictured spaces, crowded dimly with thronging figures, men, horses, women—they reached no more than the outer retina of her eye. She remembered fleetingly that they had something to do with the story of Ste. Geneviève. She wanted intensely to escape from this phantom whom she herself had called up from the void to stalk at her side. But she felt she ought not to let pass, even coming from such a source, such utterly frenzied imaginings against one to whom she owed loyalty. She spoke coldly, with extreme distaste for the subject: "You're entirely wrong about Aunt Victoria. She's not in the least that kind of a woman."
He shook his head slowly. "No, no; you misunderstand me. Your Aunt Victoria is quite irreproachable, she always has been, she always will be. She is always in the right. She always will be. She did nothing to me but hire me to teach her stepson, and when my habits became too bad, discharge me, as any one would have done. She did nothing to Arnold except to leave him to the best schools and the best tutors money could buy. What more could any one have done? She had not the slightest idea that Horace Gilbert would try to poison his wife, had not the slightest connection with their quarrel. The young poet,—Adams was his name, now I remember—did not consult her before he took to cocaine. Morphine is my own specialty. Victoria of course deplored it as much as any one could. No, I'm not for a minute intimating that Victoria is a Messalina. We'd all be better off if she were. It's only our grossness that finds fault with her. Your aunt is one of the most respectable women who ever lived, as 'chaste as unsunned snow—the very ice of chastity is in her!' Indeed, I've often wondered if the redoubtable Ephraim Smith himself, for all that he succeeded in marrying her, fared any better than the rest of us. Victoria would be quite capable of cheating him out of his pay. She parches, yes, she dries up the blood—but it's not by her passion, not even by ours. Honest passion never kills. It's the Sahara sands of her egotism into which we've all emptied our veins."
Sylvia was frozen to the spot by her outraged indignation that any one should dare speak to her thus. She found herself facing a fresco of a tall, austere figure in an enveloping white garment, an elderly woman with a thin, worn, noble face, who laid one fine old hand on a stone parapet and with divine compassion and tenderness looked out over a sleeping city. The man followed the direction of her eyes. "It's Puvis de Chavannes' Ste. Geneviève as an old woman, guarding and praying for the city. Very good, isn't it? I especially admire the suggestion of the plain bare cell she has stepped out from. I often come here to look at it when I've nothing to eat." He seemed as flaccidly willing to speak on this as on any other topic; to find it no more interesting than the subject of his former speech.
Sylvia was overcome with horror of him. She walked rapidly away, towards the door, hoping he would not follow her. He did not. When she glanced back fearfully over her shoulder, she saw him still standing there, looking up at the gaunt gray figure of beneficent old age. His dreadful broken felt hat was in his hand, the water dripped from his frayed trousers over the rotting leather of his shoes. As she looked, he began to cough, loudly, terribly, so that the echoing reaches of the great nave resounded to the sound. Sylvia ran back to him and thrust her purse into his hand. At first he could not speak, for coughing, but in a moment he found breath to ask, "Is it Victoria's money?"
She did not answer.
He held it for a moment, and then opening his hand let it drop. As she turned away Sylvia heard it fall clinking on the stone floor. At the door she turned for one last look, and saw him weakly stooping to pick it up again. She fairly burst out of the door.
It was almost dusk when she was on the street again, looking down the steep incline to the Luxembourg Gardens. In the rainy twilight the fierce tension of the Rodin "Thinker" in front of the Pantheon loomed huge and tragic. She gave it a glance of startled sympathy. She had never understood the statue before. Now she was a prey to those same ravaging throes. There was for the moment no escaping them. She felt none of her former wild impulse to run away. What she had been running away from had overtaken her. She faced it now, looked at it squarely, gave it her ear for the first time; the grinding, dissonant note under the rich harmony of the life she had known for all these past months, the obscure vaults underlying the shining temple in which she had been living.
What beauty could there be which was founded on such an action as Felix' marriage to Molly—Molly, whose passionate directness had known the only way out of the impasse into which Felix should never have let her go?… An echo from what she had heard in the mass at Notre Dame rang in her ears, and now the sound was louder—Austin's voice, Austin's words: "A beauty that can't endure disharmony in conduct, the fine true ear for the deeper values, the foundations—" It was Austin, asking himself what beauty could be in any life founded, even remotely as his was, on any one's misery?