“I called on him this morning,” I replied.
“Then you know that I am aware of everything?”
“I know you wrote to Fomberteau,” I replied evasively.
“You know, too, your friend’s answer, when I asked for an explanation of his deception? He has sent you to find out for him what impression his infamous note has produced upon me? Now, confess that is so, it will be more straightforward.”
“Why do you judge me to be like that, mademoiselle?” I said, displaying grief which she could see was sincere, for she looked at me in astonishment, while even I was surprised at my own words: “You were more just to me. You understand that sometimes silence is neither an approbation nor a complicity. It is true that Jacques did not conceal his sorry scheme nor his note from me. I did not hide from him what I thought of his harshness, and if I come here it is of my own accord, under the impulse of a sympathy which I admit I have no right to feel. We have only been friends for twenty-four hours and yet I feel that sympathy. You spoke to me with such a noble outpouring of the heart, with such touching confidence that henceforth, I thought, we cannot be strangers. I felt that you were unhappy and I came to you simply and naturally. If it was an indiscretion you have thoroughly punished me for it.”
“Forgive me,” she said in different tones with an altered look as she stretched out her little burning hand to me. “I am suffering and that makes me unjust. I, too, though I hardly know you, feel too keen a sympathy for you to doubt yours. But this note from Jacques has wounded me and he really has gone too far. He knows that I love him and he thinks he can do as he pleases with me. He is mistaken. He does not know where he is hurting me by playing with my heart in the way he is doing!”
“Do not be enraged at what is only a burst of anger in him,” I said, full of apprehension. “You wrote to Fomberteau. For the moment Jacques was wounded. He wrote most unkindly to you, but I am sure he regrets it by this time.”
“He?” she cried with a nasty laugh. “If you are saying what you think, you hardly know him. That which causes me the most pain, please understand me, is not what he has done to me, though that makes me suffer cruelly, it is what he pretends to himself to be from the idea I had of him. I put him so high, so high! I saw in him a being apart from others, some one rare, as rare as his talent! Yet I find him like the lovers of all my theatre companions, the worst of their lovers, those who have not even the courage of their infidelities and conceal them by girlish untruths, those to whom the love given to them is nothing more than vanity, a woman’s sentiment to be put in the button-hole like a flower. But come, my passion blinds me no longer. That rends me, and he, who is so intelligent, does not even suspect the nature of my suffering. Don’t you think that I guessed that creature Madam de Bonnivet invited him to supper last evening, or else to see her home, or worse still? We know what fashionable women are when they once begin. We have about us the same men as they do, and they tell us their stories. They are sometimes haughty wretches; and Jacques accepted her invitation because she has a house, horses, pictures, dresses by Worth, 50,000 franc necklaces, and 30,000 franc furs. But I, too, some day when I like, will have luxury since that is what pleases this great writer with the soul of a snob. I have only to accept Tournade as my lover, the big fellow with a face like a coachman whom you saw in my dressing-room, and I shall have a house as good as Madam Bonnivet’s barrack, diamonds, dresses by Worth, carriages and horses. I will have them, I will have them, and he shall know it. He will be the man who has turned me into a kept woman, a courtesan, and I will tell him so and shout it after him. Do you think I dare not?”
“No, you will not dare,” I replied; “even to say it raises a feeling of disgust in you.”
“No,” she replied in a dull voice, “you must not think me better than I really am. There are days when that glittering life tempts me. I have been rich, you see. Up to the age of twelve or thirteen I was surrounded by all the luxuries it was possible for a father making 100,000 francs a year on the Stock Exchange to give his only daughter. Ah well, at times I miss that luxury. The mediocrity of this drab, vulgar and commonplace existence disgusts and oppresses me. When I am waiting for a tram with a waterproof and overshoes to save a cab fare of 35 sous, I sometimes get impatient, and those tempting words, 'If you liked,’ come into my mind. Ah! when I have a soul full of happiness, when I can think that I love and am loved, that I am realizing and carrying out the romance of my youth, that Jacques clings to me as I do to him, and that I shall remain mingled in his life and work, then it is an intoxication to answer myself: 'If I liked? But I do not like.’ I smile at my beloved poverty because it is my beloved chimera. But when I have terrible evidence, as I did to-day, that I am the dupe of a mirage, that this man has no more heart than the wood of this furniture”—and she struck with her clenched fist the table upon which she was leaning while she talked to me—“then I make a different reply to the temptation. 'If I liked?’ I repeat and I reply: 'It is true, and I am very foolish not to like!’ I shall not always be so.”