"Boy," she cried, "thou canst not understand. Many steps down hellwards have I gone, and in the pit there is knowledge. I knew good as thou knowest it. Evil now I know as, please God, thou wilt never know it. But, look you, from my very knowledge of evil, I am given a tongue with which to speak to thee. Keep virgin. Thou art virgin now; my hand upon thy sword-arm tells me that. Keep virgin until the day cometh and bringeth thy lady and thy destined love to thee."
There were tears in the young man's eyes as he looked down into the great pendulous painted face, from which now the evil seemed to be wiped away as a cloth wipes away a chalk mark upon a slate.
As the last ray of a setting sun sometimes touches to a fugitive glory—a last fugitive glory—some ugly, sordid building of a town, so here he saw something maternal and sweet upon the face of this old brothel-keeper, this woman who had amassed a huge fortune in ministering to the pride of life, the pomp, vanity, and lusts of Principalities and Powers.
He turned half round, and took the woman's left hand in his.
"My mother," he said, with an infinitely winning and yet very melancholy gaze, "my mother, I think, indeed, that love will never come to me. I am not made so. May the Mother of God shield me from that which is not love, but natheless seemeth to have love's visage when one is hot in wine or stirred to excitement. But thou, thou wert not ever...."
She broke in upon him quickly.
Her great red lips pouted out like a ripe plum. The protruding fishy eyes positively lit up with disdain of herself and of her life.
"Mon cher," she said, "Holà! I was a young girl once in Lorraine. I had a brother—I will tell you little of that old time—but I have blood."
"Yes," she continued, throwing back her head, till the great rolls of flesh beneath her chin stretched into tightness, "yes, I have blood. There was a day when I was a child, when the poet Jean D'Aquis wrote of us—
'Quand nous habitions tous ensemble
Sur nos collines d'autrefois,
Où l'eau court, où le buisson tremble
Dans la maison qui touche aux bois.'