"The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million eyes; do you not know? There is nothing you have not done that has not been told to me. But I can always wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong; you are very weak, of course;—you have a faith, and you follow it; and it leads you on and on, on and on, and one day it will disappear,—and you will plunge after it,—and it will drown you. You seek for this man and you cannot find even his grave. You are like a woman who seeks for her lover on a battle-field. But the world is a carnage where the vultures soon pick bare the bones of the slain, and all skeletons look alike, and are alike, unlovely, Folle-Farine."
"You came—to say this?" she said, through her locked teeth.
"Nay—I came to see your beauty: your ice-god tired soon; but I——My golden pear would have been better vengeance for a slighted passion than his beggar's quarter, and these wretched rags——"
She held her misery and her shame and her hatred alike down under enforced composure.
"There is no shame here," she said, between her teeth. "A beggar's quarter, perhaps; but these poor copper coins and these rags I earn with clean hands."
He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign mockery, which stung her so ruthlessly.
"No shame? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you, that, live as you may, shame will be always your garment in life and in death? You—a thing beautiful, nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to be innocent likewise! The world will clothe you with shame, whether you choose it or not. But the world, as I say, will give you one choice. Take its red robe boldly from it, and weight it with gold and incrust it with jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the white garments of virtue will envy you the red robe bitterly then."
Her arms were crossed upon her breast; her eyes gazed at him with the look he had seen in the gloom of the evening, under the orchards by the side of the rushing mill-water.
"You came—to say this?"
"Nay: I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your northern god soon tired, I say; but I——Look yonder a moment," he pursued; and he motioned downward to where the long lines of light gleamed in the wondrous city which was stretched at their feet; and the endless murmur of its eternal sea of pleasure floated dimly to them on the soft night air. "See here, Folle-Farine: you dwell with the lowest; you are the slave of street mimes; no eyes see you except those of the harlot, the beggar, the thief, the outcast; your wage is a crust and a copper coin; you have the fate of your namesake, the dust, to wander a little while, and then sink on the stones of the streets. Yet that you think worthy and faithful, because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh, beautiful fool! what would your lost lover say if beholding you here amidst the reek of the mob and the homage of thieves? He would say of you the most bitter thing that a man can say of a woman: 'She has sunk into sin, but she has been powerless to gild her sin, or make it of more profit than was her innocence.' And a man has no scorn like the scorn which he feels for a woman who sells her soul—at a loss. You see?—ah, surely, you see, Folle-Farine?"