* * *
That very evening, or on another like it, as we were driving home from the theatre in our automobile, she asked me suddenly:
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“That there are women and young girls like those whom we saw on the stage?”
“Of course there are, many like them, and many worse. What a child you are.”
“Ah!” she murmured.
She said no more, but the electric light which shone upon her showed me her look of pain. She felt a deep sadness at learning of the existence of so many guilty women.
* * *
The popular books of the day, which I purposely placed about her, thinking to tempt her into reading, usually inspired her with the same repulsion. She did not retain the names of the authors,—they were destined to be forgotten. Their literary beauty could not, for her, be separated from the beauty of the matter. Those charming modern books in which youth is presented to us as an animal at liberty, through which pleasure runs fearless of the attacks of time and death, in which the mind even has become sensual,—she only opened and began: she never finished them.