I wondered if she really could be a nun. I wondered if one could tip a nun. Out of sheer hatred one acquires a passion for tipping in France and Italy. Detestable it was on this detestable day to sit like this, being hated. I made a muttering noise and gave her a ten-franc note, and it was in a more amiable spirit that she went on with her salvaging. At last there were only two bits of carrot and an awful looking onion left to engage her attention, and I felt that one might perhaps converse.
I was right about her being no nun. She was a lay-sister, she said. And this place, she told me, was a convent-nursing-home. “Nous avons ici,” she was pleased to add, “la clientèle européenne la plus chic.”
Perhaps that was the worst stroke of that day, so far. Iris among a clientèle européenne la plus chic.... One saw the cosmopolitan divorcées, their secret illnesses and guileful pains, their nasty little coquetries and the way they would blackmail their lovers with their sufferings, and one felt the sticky night-club breath of all the silly, common harlotries of England, France, America. My poor ten-franc note must have seemed pathetic to this old lay-sister, who probably thought nothing of receiving a mille from an anxious Dago.
I had until then been trying not to wonder about Iris in the vile shadow of a prison. Suddenly I was furiously hot. What on earth was I doing here! Intruding where I was not wanted! I was about to go, to run, when the lay-sister was as though distracted from the last piece of carrot by the opening of a door in the back room. Frantically she hurried towards it. It would look too silly of me to run now. I could but ask, anyhow.
The lay-sister’s voice, voluble, vindictive, explanatory. Much good my ten francs had done! Then steps came towards me, into the lodge. “Eh,” I said. How afraid one always is of the callous French doctors with their cynical eyes and purple beards....
A man, bald, sharp-featured as a bird, in a rough brown great-coat, a tired-looking, an anxious-looking, middle-aged—Englishman!
“Masters! Conrad Masters!”
“Well,” muttered that anxious-looking man. He looked just the same when he was playing bridge. He was always playing bridge, that man. And he said he hated playing bridge. That kind of man. “Well? How are you?”
“Glad,” I said, “glad it’s no worse. Glad it’s only you. I was afraid of a purple beard.”
“And how did you get here?” A man given to muttering, that. One could hear what he said or not just as one pleased. One couldn’t, you understand, be afraid of Conrad Masters.