But Jane had had no ulterior motive in what she had done. She had come back to Paris at the end of September and had found Fan lying exhausted by haemorrhage in an untidy bed with a bowl of blood beside her, and Ivanoff on the floor, his head in his hands, sobbing, while Margot stormed at him for his uselessness. Jane had simply picked Fan up in her arms, and had carried her away, and Ivanoff like an unhappy dog had followed, his tail between his legs. The haemorrhage had thoroughly frightened him. It was a fortnight later that Philibert, one brilliant afternoon announced himself at the Palace Hotel Biarritz. Fan was better and Ivanoff had recovered from his terror. Philibert found the two women in an upstairs sitting-room overlooking the sea. Fan was on a couch, her little wizened face screwed into a smile of bravado under her lace bonnet, and a cigarette between her rouged lips. Jane looked the more ill of the two. Her usual glowing pallor had turned to the whitish-grey of ashes, there were purple circles under her eyes. She was looking out of the window, her hands clasped behind her head, and when Philibert entered she wheeled at the sound of his voice, and then stood silently trembling.
Fan cried out at him, gaily impertinent. “Hullo, Fifi, you didn’t come too soon, did you?”
He didn’t answer her. “Come with me,” he said to Jane briefly, and she followed him out of the room. He had passed Ivanoff below in the bar. The sight had added nothing pleasant to his humour.
What he said to her was what he had intended to say. Her wasted face made no impression in her favour, on the contrary. He read in her agitation signs of guilt and seemed to have forgotten that he had abandoned her during six months on the pretext that she loved him too much.
As for Jane, she listened to him in a silence that she tried to make natural and easy.
Telling me about it afterwards she said, “I had determined this time to give him no opportunity of laughing at me. I made scarcely a movement. Though I was trembling, I managed to sit down in a comfortable chair and cross my legs and lean back, as if he had come to tell me something pleasant.”
He expressed without preamble his displeasure at finding her in the company of the Ivanoffs. He was surprised to find that she cared for such people. She knew, that he loathed Ivanoff and considered him an unfit companion for any respectable woman. He saw no reason why his wife should make his name a by-word in the glaring publicity of such a place as Biarritz. Here she was in the centre of a dissolute set of cosmopolitan adventurers, behaving like a common woman of light character, or at least giving the impression to the world of so behaving. He presumed that the Ivanoffs were her guests and were costing her a pretty penny. That was a side issue. The Russian was a dissolute ruffian who lived not alone on his winning at cards but on women. He was a man kept by women. As for Ivanoff’s wife, she knew what her husband was up to and profitted by his earnings. Jane, with white lips interrupted him here.
“I don’t believe you,” she said quietly. And then more sharply, “You forget that Fan is my best friend.”