But he never finished the sentence. He sighed and slipped back into the pillows of the bed surmounted by the four gilded swans. Madame Nozières began to weep wildly and flung herself upon him, kissing him again and again. For Ellen there was no such relief. She sat now, stark upright and tragic, bound by all the years in which she had shown a proud and scornful face to the world. No, there was no such relief for her. She knew it. She could only sit there, quietly cold and white, and all the time she wanted to scream, to cry out, to beat her head against the stone floor of the corridor where Doctor Chausson stood waiting gravely. She could only sit and watch while Madame Nozières wept out her heart.
It was the sound of weeping, wild and passionate, that summoned Doctor Chausson. The two women had forgotten him, but the good man knew well enough what the sound signified. Softly he opened the door and came into the frivolous room. There beside the gilded bed he saw the sister, a strange, silent, handsome woman, dressed in black with her fur coat slipped to the floor at her feet, a woman (he thought) bien Anglaise, who could not weep. He knew that she suffered more than the other, more than Colette who had flung herself on the boy to weep hysterically. Colette, the charming, the fastidious, the beautiful, flung down in utter disarray, her eyes red and swollen with weeping, her golden hair all disheveled.... Colette whom he had seen but two nights before flushed and radiant at the Princesse de Guermantes’. He understood now why she had been so beautiful and so happy. But the boy could not see her now, and so nothing mattered.
He stood for a moment in silence, as if in respect for the grief of the two women. All this he had seen before, many times, ... a young man, a boy, who had loved life as this one had loved it, who could jest, as this one had jested, with his very last breath. A boy whom women loved as these two women, the one so wildly, the other so profoundly, with such an intense, secret flame. It was cruel ... hideous....
He moved forward and touched Madame Nozières on her slim shoulder. And all the while he was conscious that the eyes of the other woman were watching him, stony and cold and tragic.
“Colette,” he said softly. “Colette.... You must not.... You must be quiet.” With a gentle strength he lifted her from the bed. “Colette, it is nearly dawn.... You must be discreet. There will be questions asked.”
But she paid no heed. She was sobbing now, bitterly and without shame. “You must be discreet,” he repeated.
“What difference does that make now?... It is nothing ... less than nothing....” And she fell to weeping once more.
He mixed for her a powder and forced her to drink it, saying, “There is the necessary business. You must not be seen here ... like this.”
But she would not go. It was Ellen who at last stirred herself and succeeded in quieting Madame Nozières. “I will take him to my house,” she said, quietly. “You may come there.... You may stay there if you like. It is a big house ... in the Rue Raynouard.... No one will ever know.”
She drew Doctor Chausson aside and gave him the address. “I will take care of things,” she said. “I will stay here if you will arrange for the rest. I would like to stay ... alone. It was good of you.... There is nothing I can say.”