‘Then you will not be missed till you are well out of the way. There will be no fuss, no scandal.’
‘There will be a tremendous fuss at the theatre,’ said La Chicot. ‘Who is to take my place in the burlesque?’
‘Any one. What need you care? You will have done with burlesque and the stage for ever.’
‘True,’ said La Chicot.
And then she remembered the Student’s Theatre in Paris, and how her popularity had waned there. The same thing might happen here in London, perhaps, after a year or two. Her audience would grow tired of her. Already people in the theatre had begun to make disagreeable remarks about the empty champagne bottles which came out of her dressing-room. By-and-by, perhaps, they would be impudent enough to call her a drunkard. She would be glad to have done with them.
Yet, degraded as she was, there were depths of vice from which her better instincts plucked her back; as if it were her good angel clutching her garments to drag her from the edge of an abyss. She had once loved her husband; nay, after her own manner, she loved him still, and could not calmly contemplate leaving him. Her brain, muddled by champagne and brandy, shaped all thoughts confusedly; yet at her worst the idea of selling herself to this Jewish profligate shocked and disgusted her. Her soul was swayed to and fro, to this side and to that. She had no inclination to vice, but she would have liked the wages of sin; for in this lower world the wages of sin meant a villa at Passy, and a couple of carriages.
‘Good night,’ she said abruptly to her lover. ‘I must not be seen talking to you. My husband may come home at any minute.’
‘I hear that he generally comes home in the middle of the night,’ said Mr. Lemuel.
‘What business is it of yours if he does?’ asked La Chicot, angrily.
‘Everything that concerns you is my business. When I, who love the ground you walk upon, hear how you are neglected by your husband, do you suppose the knowledge does not make me so much the more determined to win you?’