“What are you going to use me for?”
“I have ends,” replied Claude de Chauxville, who had regained his usual half-mocking composure, “that you will serve. But they will be your ends as well as mine. You will profit by them. I will take very good care that you come to no harm, for you are the ultimate object of all this. At the end of it all I see only—you.”
Etta shrugged her shoulders. It is to be presumed that she was absolutely heartless. Many women are. It is when a heartless woman has brains that one hears of her.
“What if I refuse?” asked Etta, keenly aware of the fact that this man was handicapped by his love for her.
“Then I will force you to obedience.”
Etta raised her delicate eyebrows insolently.
“Ah!”
“Yes,” said De Chauxville, with suppressed anger; “I will force you to obey me.”
The princess looked at him with her little mocking smile. She raised one hand to her head with a reflective air, as if a hair-pin were of greater importance than his words. She had dressed herself rather carefully for this interview. She never for a moment overlooked the fact that she was a woman, and beautiful. She did not allow him to forget it either.
Her mood of outraged virtue was now suddenly thrown into the background by a phase of open coquetry. Beneath her eyelids she watched for the effect of her pretty, provoking attitude on the man who loved her. She was on her own territory at this work, playing her own game; and she was more alarmed by De Chauxville’s imperturbability than by any thing he had said.