“Be it so, I have made a mistake,” the voice went on. “But I can make amends for my wrong-doing. Ah! if you only were willing—if you were willing, I could make you happy. I would occupy myself with your affairs; you should be rid of every care. You would have a sure friend, and I, too,—I would become an artiste!”
“You—an artiste!”
She drew herself up to her full height and looked at the great empty forehead, at the chicken-necked and round-shouldered Socrate, at his sallow skin, his moral hideousness, this rag of a painter and poet and thinker and philosopher.
“An artiste—you! Why, you would not be capable even to show a shaved bear, or a sick dog, or a two-headed calf! Oh, I know you! You’d like to be a professor and train Sœurette with strokes of the whip, if you were allowed! And you’d always be there at my side, to steer me through life like a devoted friend, would you? Just as you used to do before. And when I think that people may have said as much, and perhaps believed that I was your—friend,—and when I remember that you advised me to frequent the company of a rich duke and forget the friend of my childhood,—when I think of all that, it is enough to make me die of shame!”
Socrate gnashed his teeth.
“So it’s the friend of your childhood, is it?—always he?”
“Always he!” said Helia, simply.
“Yet you know—I have told you—that he loves another.”
“I know it.”
“And that he no longer cares for you.”