"Ah, don't speak to me! I know all that you're going to say—I've heard it all before! I knew it, back there a minute, when you kissed me, thinking of another woman! It's the old story—a little harder to bear this time, perhaps, because I've cared very much for you. Somehow, you seemed different from other men. You were young, you were gentle, you were respectful, mon Dieu!—respectful! I thought that it was for me you cared—me, as you saw me here, loving and needing to be loved—not the Mirabelle Tremonceau who is dressed like a doll by Paquin and Louise—the Mirabelle Tremonceau of the Acacias, and the Palais de Glace, and the Café de Paris. I said to myself that it had not all been in vain—the training, the care, the painstaking which have made me what I am. Long since, I'd come to loathe all these, my surroundings, but, for the first time, it seemed to me that perhaps they were not a sham and an imitation and a mockery. You were a gentleman—not a rasta, like the others. I thought your instincts couldn't play you false, and that I saw that they prompted you to regard me, here in my own home, as a woman and a friend, not merely as a mistress and a toy. From the first, you never presumed, you never let the thought of what, at worst, I might have been to you, come forward to shame the thought of what I was, at best! I said to myself that you cared for me—for my mind—my heart—and that what was most to others was nothing to you. When you kissed me first—that afternoon—ah, mon Dieu! I thought it was not the kiss of passion, but the kiss of love! At that moment you knew fully what I was—if you'd not guessed it before, but you asked for—nothing! Instead you played, and your soul was in the music. I've never heard such playing. It was pure—pure—pure! Ah!—"
She opened her eyes slowly, without looking at him.
"And I was happy—happier than I've ever been: because, I said, there must still be a little something in me of all I thought I'd lost. I'd not loved you before that day. It was while we were there together that it came. I would to God you'd let me go then—let me go with the memory of a look which I'd never seen in a man's eyes before—the look which said 'Respect.'"
For a moment there was silence, and then Mirabelle laughed shortly.
"That was what I was fool enough to think—all that! Quelle idiote! Nous voilà, cher ami, at the end of the chapter. Your glove is worn: you must replace it. Your flower is wilted: you must have another for your lapel!"
Now she looked full at him, her lip curling.
"It is like the Moulin," she added. "Combien est-ce que tu me donnes, beau brun?"
Andrew swung himself to a kneeling posture.
"What are you saying?" he demanded hotly. "My God! Does what has been between us mean nothing to you? Have I ever suggested—have I ever said a word to justify such a monstrous thing? I—"