“Yes; we should have a great deal of music all to ourselves. We might go away to France or Algiers, and I should forget Athens.”
“No, you would not. There is no such thing as forgetfulness until you take to drink, and then you only forget when you are drunk. The instant you become sober, memory probes your empty heart more strongly than ever.”
“Then we will drink together, Photini,” cried Rudolph, recklessly. “Give me some brandy.”
“I will not. I insist on your going back to that silly chit you’ve treated so badly. Dry her eyes—they are very pretty eyes, my friend Rudolph, and a man might be less agreeably employed. She’ll soon forgive you if you manage to look penitent enough. I boxed her ears once, and I like her all the better for it. Tell her an old woman who loves you sent you back to her.”
“Photini, you are not old,” protested Rudolph, disinclined to speak of Andromache to her. “Come back to the point. Will you have me? You say you love me.”
“Rudolph, you are an ass. Don’t you see that I am trying to save you? What does it matter for myself? You, Agiropoulos, another,—it is all the same. My life is blotted, ruined, disfigured past redemption. One liaison more or less cannot practically affect me. But with you it is different. You are a delicately-trained boy, of fastidious tastes. You are unfit to battle with the coarser elements of life. A robuster morale and a less dainty nature than yours can buffet and wrestle with brutal conditions, and be none the worse for a hundred false steps, but you will sink irretrievably upon the first. Vice sits indifferently well on some of us, and on others most deplorably. That is why women sink so much more rapidly than men. Despair and self-contempt are stones that hang fatally round their necks, and this,” she said, pointing to a flask of brandy, “helps them to carry the weight until they are crushed by it.”
“It will help me, too, I’ve no doubt,” said Rudolph.
“It is from that I would save you, and from the rest. It is not my habit to express my opinions. I despise people too much to talk seriously to them, but I am not only a musical machine in the lucid pauses of a toper. I have thought a little, too, and I know what I have lost.”
She was walking up and down the room with her hands joined behind her, and there was a glow upon her strange face that made it almost noble. When she had finished, she stood in front of Rudolph, scanned him closely, and asked:
“Are you going? I have had quite enough of this sort of thing.”