Their mother, who hated all domestic work, and could never be induced to see that their loss of money was due to her own extravagance, retired to bed, where she spent her days in reading Plato in the original, and writing charming French lyrics.
When Arithelli ran away she had gone straight to an old friend of her mother's, the widow of an ambassador in Paris. She had made up her mind to earn her own living. She would carve out for herself a career. Having decided that riding was her most saleable accomplishment, she had gone round to the riding school where the managers of the Hippodromes of Vienna, Buda-Pesth and Barcelona waited to select equestriennes.
Luck, youthful confidence, and her tragic, unyouthful beauty, had all ranged themselves together to procure her the much desired engagement.
"I made up my mind to get taken on," she concluded. "Et me voilà! I did all sorts of desperate jumps that day. I felt desperate. If I hadn't got it, there was only the Morgue. I couldn't have gone home."
Emile listened in silence, and drank absinthe and considered.
That night at a meeting of the Brotherhood he took the leader,
Sobrenski, aside and said:
"It was decided the other day that we wanted someone to take messages and run errands. Someone who could go unnoticed into places where it would be suspicious for us to be seen. You suggested a boy. Fate has been so kind as to show me a woman who seems to be in every way suitable—or at least with a little training she will become so."
"A woman!" echoed the other. "Are you mad?"
"I conclude her to be a woman because of her clothes. Otherwise she seems to be a mixture of a boy and wood-elf. The combination appears to me to be a fascinating one. She is of good family, half Irish, speaks three languages, asks no questions, and seems to have an extraordinary capacity for holding her tongue. It is on that account that I questioned her sex. Her appearance is excessively feminine. Of course I do not propose to enrol her among us at once. As I have said before, there are many ways in which a woman would be useful."
Sobrenski pulled doubtfully at his reddish, pointed beard. "Does she know anything about the Cause?"