"Will you take a little drop while you are waiting, gentlemen?"
"Nothing for us, thank you."
She drank alone, and seemed to forget that we were present. None of us spoke. I began to wonder if we need remain. Then, drinking, she grew garrulous. It was of Jeanne she talked. She gave us her maternal views, and incidentally betrayed infamies of her own career. I am a man of the world, but I shuddered at that woman. The suitor who could have risked making her child his wife would have been demented, or sublime. And while she maundered on, gulping from her glass, and chuckling at her jests, the ghastliness of it was that, in the gutter face before us, I could trace a likeness to Jeanne; I think Georges must have traced it, too. The menace of heredity was horrible. We were listening to Jeanne wrecked, Jeanne thirty years older—Jeanne as she might become!
Ciel! To choose a bride with this blood in her—a bride from the dregs!
"Let us go, Georges," I murmured. "Courage! You will forget her. We'll be off."
He was livid. I saw that he could bear no more.
But the creature overheard, and in those bleary eyes intelligence awoke.
"What? Hold on!" she stammered. "Is one of you the toff that wants to marry her? Ah!… I've been letting on finely, haven't I? It was a plant, was it? You've come here ferreting and spying?" She turned towards me in a fury: "You!"
Certainly I had made a comment from time to time, but I could not see why she should single me out for her attack. She lurched towards me savagely. Her face was thrust into mine. And then, so low that only I could hear, and like another woman, she breathed a question:
"Can I act?"