Yet I am quite certain that not for a moment was I in love with Madame de Tinquerville. Curiosity, vanity, habit, idleness; the pride of a young man still a boy in the ways of the world; a fancied domination over a woman accomplished in artifice; an unsated appetite for pleasure; susceptibility to flattery; the old Littledale failing of intense exaggeration in all things; all these motives I clearly see. And then,—I was playing at love, which often is more dangerous than love itself.
* * * * *
I have frequently heard women of the demimonde referred to as dangerous women. There is nothing dangerous in such women except to a young and inexperienced man, with quick sympathies and a conscience. They carry their warning on their faces. The woman who is truly dangerous is the unsuspected woman who waits behind the mask of a Madonna. Since my arrival, twenty instances have reminded me of the woman I knew as Letty, Madame de Tinquerville.
I do not know that I can be entirely dispassionate as I look back over this incident in my life. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner: to understand everything is to forgive everything. There may have been in her life, in her inheritance, or in her tradition—perhaps in her earlier contact with men—things which would make her comprehensible. I do not know them. There is a mystery of evil and good in us that defies analysis. It is so in my case; it must be so in hers. And yet,—she is the only human being in my experience who did evil from the sheer delight of doing it. She did it as a child plays with some defenceless animal. Yet there was nothing obvious about her, and in all the different societies through which she moved I doubt if more than five men ever suspected what lay behind her quiet, strictly conventional attitude toward life.
* * * * *
I met her first at the studio of a fashionable artist, Enrico Gonzalez, in the midst of a Goya fête, to which the fashionable, slightly déclassée society of cosmopolitan Paris had come, eager for a new sensation.
I saw her directly I had passed under the swinging lanterns and entered the glowing studio. Amid the gay confusion of reds and yellows, greens and purples of gala Spain, she stood out, slight and dark in the black velvet serenity of her costume,—an infanta with a certain intuitive dignity of childish astonishment.
She saw my persisting look, studied me a moment, and asked a friend to present me. The next moment I was at her side, flattered, inviting her to dance.
She shook her head with a smile.
“What—not dance?”