"As you say, another woman——"
"Oh, la la! So there was once upon a time a ver' serious young man who forget to be quite serious. Voyons—you 'ave to tell me all now—just as I tell you."
He turned on her then. In five brief, savage sentences he had told her of Frances and the woman in the hospital. And when he had done he read her face with its tolerant good-humour, and the full enormity of it all burst over him like a flood of crude light. He turned away from her stammering:
"I've no business here—I've no business to be your doctor—or anyone's doctor. I think I must be going mad."
She shook her head.
"No—no—only too serious, mon pauvre jeune homme. But I like your—your Francey. I think she and I be good friends some'ow. She would see things 'ow I see them."
(He thought crazily:
"Yes, she would sit by you and look over your shoulder at your rotten life, and say: 'So that's the way it seems to you? And you're right. It's been a splendid joke.'")
"One of these days you be friends again too. And then you give 'er my leetle pearl. Say it's from Gyp, who is sorry she made so much trouble. Why not? You think it make her sad? It is not for that I give it you. It is to give you pleasure too."
He was labouring under an almost physical distress. She was poking fun at him, at herself, at death. She was making him a partner of thieves and loose women. And yet: