Liane flung off her Cleopatra robe and began making-up for a fresh scene, while she tossed her words at Jean over her shoulder.
“A pretty fool you must think I am!” she said disdainfully. “You were being polite to a girl who sang well, were you? One would suppose you had been calling on a jeune fille of the provinces to hear you! No, no! my friend! this is a theatre and that girl there is a cabotine—a pinch of dust—a little worm under my foot! Sing well indeed! What next? They will have crows for Opera before you hear Selba on these boards again! You suppose yourself to be a musician already, it seems, and you are not, you are nothing! I take you away from your cows in the country, I lift you to an honour many men would perish for, yes, and have perished for in vain! and I have to see you in my own theatre treating a woman of my position to the very last indignity—the very last, I would have you know, Jean, that a woman of my spirit will put up with. Selba indeed!” She flung her powder-puff across the room, and touched up her left eyebrow in a dramatic but carefully measured fury.
Jean felt sick. He did not believe in all this nonsense about Selba; he felt instead the sharp return of his former doubt—had she kept her promise about Golaud?
It was not the most auspicious moment to ask her, and yet the pressure of the unendurable was upon him. He felt himself boxed up with a lie; there was not one word of reality in Liane; she was a splendid vision as she sat there facing the mirror, but her very beauty seemed to set his teeth on edge. Was not this false too, upheld by the paraphernalia of little boxes and paintbrushes, of long, fine coils of false hair, without any of that tender natural grace which had not been enough to keep him by Margot’s side a few minutes ago? He was ashamed of himself. He paced to and fro in the tiny, hot little room and thought of all his fine principles with a fierce disgust.
“Eh bien!” said Liane. “Have you nothing to say for yourself; are you dumb as well as blind? You could talk well enough, it appears, to that piece of rubbish downstairs.”
“Liane,” he jerked at her quickly. “Have you seen Golaud again?”
Liane stared at him.
“What?” she said, twisting a pearl net in and out of her hair. “So you think to get out of it that way, do you? Seen him again? Of course I have seen him again, and why not, I should like to know! What do you stare at me like that for, with your mouth open and your face white, like a foiled villain in the fourth act who sees his wife’s ghost? I told you once before I was not a nun. I see whom I please, I do what I like—and I amuse myself! I like you when you are good, because you are poor and an artist. I like Maurice Golaud because he is rich and not an artist. He does not object to you; why should you object to him?”
“But, Liane, your promise!” cried Jean. He was terribly shaken, the world seemed to be falling to pieces about him. Where was this dream that he had thought so magnificent a mystery? this romance to which he had dedicated himself as a worshipper at a shrine? His romance was a pricked bubble, the thing he worshipped a monstrous farce.
Some of these thoughts with their roused horror and disgust struck at Liane out of his expressive eyes. They made her angrier than ever; she should have received gratitude, and she felt reproach. That he should dare to reproach her when she had been so good to him! She almost shrieked at him in reply.