Susan lamented loudly. “You little fool, you’ve literally gone hungry. Take your fill now!”
“Be quiet,” Eva replied, “what do you know of my hunger?”
People besieged her threshold, but she received only a few and chose them carefully. She lived in a world of flowers. Jean Cardillac had furnished her an exquisite house, the garden terrace of which was like a tropical paradise. When she reclined or sat there in the evening under the softened light of the lamps, surrounded by her gently chatting friends, whose most casual glance was an act of homage, she seemed removed from the world of will and of the senses and to be present in this realm of space only as a beautiful form.
Yet even those who thought her capable of any metamorphosis were astonished when a sudden one came upon her and when its cause seemed to be an unknown and inconsiderable person. Prince Alexis Wiguniewski had introduced the man, and his name was Ivan Michailovitch Becker. He was short and homely, with deep-set Sarmatian eyes, lips that looked swollen, and a straggling beard about his chin and cheeks. Susan was afraid of him.
It was on a December night when the snow was banked up at the windows that Ivan Michailovitch Becker had talked with Eva Sorel for eight hours in the little room spread with Italian rugs. In the adjoining room Susan walked shivering up and down, wondering when her mistress would call for help. She had an old shawl about her shoulders. From time to time she took an almond from her pocket, cracked it with her teeth, and threw the shells into the fireplace.
But on this night Eva did not go to bed, not even when the Russian had left her. She entered her sleeping chamber and let her hair roll down unrestrained so that it hid her head and body, and she sat on a low stool holding her fevered cheeks in her hollow hands. Susan, who had come to help her undress, crouched near her on the floor and waited for a word.
At last her young mistress spoke. “Read me the thirty-third canto of the Inferno,” she begged.
Susan brought two candles and the book. She placed the candles on the floor and the volume on Eva’s lap. Then she read with a monotonous sound of lamentation. But toward the end, especially where the poet speaks of petrified and frozen tears, her clear voice grew firmer and more eloquent.
“Lo pianto stesso lì pianger non lascia;
E il duol, che trova in sugli occhi rintoppo,