And she turned away and walked from him in the gloom, slowly, as though the deed she spake of tempted her.
CHAPTER XIV.
The poverties of the city devoured her incessantly, like wolves; the temptations of the city crouched in wait for her incessantly, like tigers. She was always hungry, always heartsick, always alone; and there was always at her ear some tempting voice, telling her that she was beautiful and was a fool. Yet she never dreamed once of listening, of yielding, of taking any pity on herself. Was this virtue? She never thought of it as such; it was simply instinct; the instinct of a supreme fidelity, in which all slighter and meaner passions were absorbed and slain.
Once or twice, through some lighted casement in some lamp-lit wood, where the little gay boats flashed on fairy lakes, she would coldly watch that luxury, that indolence, that rest of the senses, with a curl on her lips, where she sat or stood, in the shadow of the trees.
"To wear soft stuffs and rich colors, to have jewels in their breasts, to sleep in satin, to hear fools laugh, to have both hands full of gold, that is what women love," she thought; and laughed a little in her cold wonder, and went back to her high cage in the tower, and called the pigeons in from the rooftops at sunset, and kissed their purple throats, and broke among them her one dry crust, and, supperless herself, sat on the parapet and watched the round white moon rise over the shining roofs of Paris.
She was ignorant, she was friendless, she was savage, she was very wretched; but she had a supreme love in her, and she was strong.
A hundred times the Red Mouse tried to steal through the lips which hunger, his servile and unfailing minister, would surely, the Red Mouse thought, disbar and unclose to him sooner or later.
"You will tire, and I can wait, Folle-Farine," the Red Mouse had said to her, by the tongue of the old man Sartorian; and he kept his word very patiently.
He was patient, he was wise; he believed in the power of gold, and he had no faith in the strength of a woman. He knew how to wait—unseen, so that this rare bird should not perceive the net spread for it in its wildness and weariness. He did not pursue, nor too quickly incense, her.