"The one is a human actress. She is applauded because she is of the same clay as those who listen to her. And they have need of the lie on which the most beautiful roles are builded.
"But the other, she is an actress of God. She plays a part so great and so sorrowful that she has not found one man who understands her and who is rich enough to pay her.
"And the great actress has never attained, even in her most beautiful roles, the true genius of sorrow which makes the little prostitute rest her forehead upon me."
THE GOODNESS OF GOD
She was a dainty and delicate little creature who worked in a shop. She was, perhaps, not very intelligent, but she had soft, black eyes. They looked at you a little sadly, and then drooped. You felt that she was affectionate and commonplace with that tender commonplaceness, which real poets understand, and which is the absence of hate.
You knew that she was as simple as the modest room in which she lived alone with her little cat that some one had given her. Every morning before she went to the shop, she left for her a little bit of milk in a bowl.
And like her gentle mistress the little cat had sad, kind eyes. She warmed herself on the window-sill in the sun beside a pot of basil. Sometimes she licked her little paw, and used it as a brush on the short fur of her head. Sometimes she played with a mouse.
One day the cat and the mistress both found themselves pregnant, the one by a handsome fellow who deserted her, and the other by a beautiful tom-cat who also went his way.
But there was this difference. The poor girl became ill, very ill, and passed her days sobbing. The little cat made for herself a kind of joyous cradling-place in the sun where it shone upon her white, drolly inflated abdomen.
The cat's lover had come later than the girl's. So things happened that they were both confined at the same time.