Then suddenly she remembered three figures, all exactly alike; three figures of an old man in a dreary room, who smiled and looked at each other with humorous sympathy, like three friends who understand without need of words. Work! Work! There's the secret of life!
The voice of the old Senator resounded still in Regina's soul. Since seeing him she had learned his story; his wife, a beautiful woman, brilliant and young, had killed herself, for what reason none could say. Work! Work! That was the secret! Perhaps the old Senator, panegyrising the working woman, had been thinking of his wife who had never worked.
Work! This was the secret of the world's future. All would eventually be happy because all would work.
"No! I don't represent the future as I have fondly fancied. I belong to the present—very much to the present! I am the parasite par excellence. I eat the labour of my husband, and I devour his moral life as well, because he loves me—loves me too much. I don't even make him happy. Why do I live? What's the good of me? What use am I? I'm good for nothing but to bear children; and, in point of fact, I don't want any children! I shouldn't know how to bring them up! Besides, what's the good of bringing children into the world? Wouldn't it be better I had never been born? What's the good of life?"
Surely her soul had become involved in the shadow darkening round her! Everything in her seemed dead. And then suddenly she thought of the luminous evenings on the shores of her great river at home; and saw again the wide horizons, the sky all violet and geranium colour, the infinite depths of the waters, the woods, the plain. She passed along the banks, the subdued splendour of all things reflected in her eyes, the water of rosy lilac, the heavens which flamed behind the wood, the warm grass which clothed the banks. Young willow-trees stretched out to drink the shining water, and they drank, they drank, consumed by an inextinguishable thirst. She passed on, and as the little willows drank, so she also drank in dreams from the burning river. What limitless horizons! What deeps of water! What tender distant voices carried by the waves, dying on the night! Was it a call out of a far world? Was it the crying of birds from the wood? Was it the woodpecker tapping on the poplar-tree?
Alas, no! it was her own foot beating the devil's tattoo; it was the clock ticking away indifferently in the penumbra of the little room; it was the caged canary moaning for nostalgia in the window opposite, above the lurid abyss of the courtyard.
Regina jumped to her feet; she was rebellious and desperate, suffocated by a sense of rage.
"I'll tell him the moment he comes in," she thought; "I'll cry, 'Why did you take me from there? Why have you brought me to this place? What can I do here? I must go away. I require air. I require light. You can't give me light, you can't give me air, and you never told me! How was I to know the world was like this? Away with all these gimcracks, all this lumber! I don't want it. I only want air! air! air! I am suffocating! I hate you all! I curse the city and the men who built it, and the fate which robs us even of the sight of heaven!'"
She went to her room, and automatically looked in the glass. By the last glimmer of day she saw her beautiful shining hair, her shining teeth, her shining nails, her fine skin which (softened by a light stratum of "Crema Venus") had almost the transparent delicacy of Miss Harris's. Her resentment grew. She went to her dressing-table, snatched up the bottle of "Crema" and dashed it against the wall. The bottle bounded off on the bed without breaking. She picked it up and replaced it on the table.