A NEW HOME
Raft was still in the room where she had left him. As they passed through the hall where a number of people were seated about in basket chairs she felt every eye fixed upon her and her companion. Then out in the sunlit Cannabier Prolongué she drew a deep breath just as a person draws a deep breath after a dive.
She also felt free.
She had always been free in theory; possessed of her own money she could have done absolutely as she liked, in theory. In practice she had always been a slave. The slave of a thousand and one things and circumstances, things and circumstances many of them troublesome, many of them wearisome, all of them not to be denied.
“Mademoiselle, your bath is ready.”
“Mademoiselle, the first gong has sounded.”
“What dress will Mademoiselle wear this afternoon?”
Oh, the day, the day with its hundred phases and divisions, the dresses that went with each phase, the lukewarm emotions and interests and boredom and suppressed hatreds, this thing called the day, which she had first reviewed in the open boat after the wreck of the Gaston de Paris terrified to find it torn from her—this thing had been returned to her that morning in all its futility. It seemed to her, as she cast it away, a horrible gaud, a thing made of tinsel, yet a thing that could destroy the soul and blind the eyes and numb the heart.
She had never been free, she had always been the veriest slave, the slave of things, of people, of convenances, and of circumstances.
Doctor Epinard had spoken something of the truth.