It was the front room looking on to the street. A lamp was burning on the round table in the centre of the room, and I saw by the light of it the poverty of the furniture and its untidiness. At one end of the room was a big iron bedstead with curtains of torn lace, and on the wooden chairs hung some soiled petticoats and blouses. There was a small cooking-stove in a corner, but no charcoal burned in it, and I remember an ebony-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. I remember that mirror vividly. I remember, for instance, that a bit of the ebony had broken off, showing the white plaster underneath, and a crack in the right-hand corner of the looking-glass.
Probably my eyes were attracted to it because of a number of photographs stuck into the framework. They were photographs of a girl in a variety of stage costumes; and glancing at the girl, whom the doctor had put into a low arm-chair, I saw that they were of her. But with all the tragic difference between happiness and misery; worse than that—between unscathed girlhood and haggard womanhood. This girl with red hair and a white waxen face was pretty still. There was something more than prettiness in the broadness of her brow and the long tawny lashes that were now veiling her closed eyes as she sat with her head back against the chair, showing a long white throat. But her face was lined with an imprint of pain, and her mouth, rather long and bow-like, was drawn with a look of misery.
The doctor spoke to me—in English, of course.
“Half-starved, I should say. Or starved.”
He sniffed at the stove and the room generally.
“No sign of recent cooking.”
He opened a cupboard and looked in.
“Nothing in the pantry, sonny. I guess the girl would do with a meal.”
I did not answer him. I was staring at the photographs stuck into the mirror, and saw one that was not a girl’s portrait. It was the photograph of a young French lieutenant. I crossed the room and looked at it closer, and then spoke to the little doctor in a curiously unexcited voice, as one does in moments of living drama.
“This girl is Pierre Nesle’s sister.”