“Alors,” she whispered, “is it for me to tell you to profit by to-day? I give you all that an artist should give an artist; but, Jean, that is not all I have to give!”
Jean’s eyes were drawn to her face; she knew that was the way to make him forget all inconvenient ideas; and he forgot them. He looked at her and everything vanished, the cold of the night around them, the flashing lights, the swift, sharp cries of the streets, the softened whirr and buzz of the passing cars, the houses, those sheltered screens of human life, standing between them and the sky—all these outer things, and all the inner things too, Jean’s scruples and his struggles, his reluctance, and the safeguard of his pride, failed and fell away from him, under the spell of Liane’s eyes. A hard compulsion came upon him; at that moment he ceased to worship Liane, he wanted her. He ceased to reflect; he could not speak. He put out his hand and caught hers. He hurt her, but she did not wince; like the girl in the picture, she met his demand with serene, satisfied eyes, waiting for inevitable surrender.
“Maurice is away to-night,” she whispered. Jean followed her into the flat without a word.
The fortnight that followed Jean never cared greatly to recall. There was still the Bank in the daytime; sometimes he fell asleep over his work, but his fellow clerks were very kind; they woke him up and said to each other: “See how he has begun to live, this little one!”
When he was roused, Jean used to shiver and feel horribly sad; at these times he wished that he had never seen Liane; a fierce thirst for loneliness, and freedom for his soul, possessed him; he hungered to shut out Liane’s face and get back to his piano, his empty room, and the liberty of his dreams. The long, dull day cramped and stiffened him, and the money that ran through his hands seemed to his nervous fancy to stain them like an unclean thing. It was as if in its monotonous reiteration it spelt Liane. It was for her that it came there, for her that it increased, and then ran back into the streets of Paris, a golden, sordid stream. The sound of the money made Jean yearn for the sound and smell of the earth at St. Jouin, for the clean air and sweet loneliness of the woods. But when evening fell and the lights came out, and Paris awoke, when the streets filled with the stir of a well-dressed, living throng, then Jean’s heart quickened, and the Bank and St. Jouin, and even the piano and its dreams, sank back into a hidden place in his soul, and he became the happiest and gayest young man in Paris, inconceivably loved by the most splendid woman in the world.
It was not possible that he could wholly succeed in hiding from Liane his intense separation of spirit. She knew, indeed, extremely little about spirit, but on the other hand she knew a great deal about lovers, and it did not escape her that Jean had, at moments, the power of estranging himself from her possession. At the end of the fortnight Maurice returned from the provinces, and Jean explained to Liane in her dressing-room at the Odéon that he had met Maurice.
“Well,” said Liane impatiently. “I do not see anything very extraordinary in that. I have also met him, mon cher; what then?”
“But you must not meet him again, Liane, not now,” said Jean quietly. “You say the flat is your own, so I shall not ask you to leave it, but you must not allow Maurice to visit you there again.”
Liane was silent a moment from sheer astonishment. It was true that with a desire to spare Jean’s feelings she had told him the flat was her own. It was equally true that it was not—not in the sense in which she had led Jean to believe it to be.
“Must not, Jean!” she repeated, laying down her powder-puff and regarding him with blank amazement. “Are you mad? What has this poor Maurice done, then, that I am not to receive him?”