She changed her position at sound of his approach, her large hat described new angles, and she looked back over her shoulder.
"What!" she said aloud. "The little friend of Blake! But how droll!"
She showed no surprise, she merely waved her hand to a chair facing her own.
Max sat down; a hot and dirty waiter came forward languidly, and wine was ordered.
Lize pushed aside the glass of green-tinted liquid that she had been consuming through a straw, and waited for what was to come. Max, looking at her in the crude light of a gas-jet, saw that her face was whiter, her eyes more hollow than when her wrath had fallen on him at the Bal Tabarin; also, he noted that a little dew of heat showed through the mask of powder on her face.
Silence was maintained until the wine was brought; then she drank thirstily, laid down her empty glass and turned her eyes upon him.
"You have parted with your friend, eh?"
The surprise of the question was so sharp that it killed speculation. He did not ask how she had probed his secret—whether by mere intuition or through some feminine confidence of Jacqueline's. The fact of her knowledge swept him beyond the region of lucid thought; he accepted the situation as it was offered.
"Yes," he said. "I have parted with my friend."
"And why? He is a good boy—Blake!" She looked at him with her inscrutable eyes, and after many days he was conscious of the touch of human compassion. He did not analyze the woman's feelings—he did not even conjecture whether she knew him for boy or girl. All he comprehended was that out of this sordid atmosphere—out of the lethargy of the sultry night—some force had touched him, some force was drawing him back into the circle of human things. Strange indeed are the workings of the mind. He, who had shrunk with an agonized sensitiveness from the sympathy of M. Cartel—from the tender comprehension of the little Jacqueline—suddenly felt his reserve melt and break in presence of this woman of the boulevards with her air of impassive ennui. Theoretically, he knew life in all its harder aspects, and it called for no vivid imagination to trace the descent of the fresh grisette of the Quartier Latin to the creature who sought her meals in the Café des Cerises-jumelles, yet hers was the accepted compassion.