"Yes!"
When he had gone she cowered down into the big bed shivering. Every bone in her body ached as if she had been beaten. She had the sensation of one who has been awakened from a bad dream. Was it all real or not?
Last night and its doings seemed centuries ago. She still heard Emile's voice as if from a distance, telling the story of the lovely siren woman who had been strangled, and then the room rocked, and the walls closed in upon her.
His words worked in her brain: "Go in for the Cause seriously. Remember it's liberty we are fighting for. A life more or less—what's that? Yours or mine? What does it matter? Do you wonder we don't make love to women? It's a goddess and not a woman before whom we burn incense. Blood and tears, money and life! Is there any sacrifice too great for her altar?"
And she had been both frightened and fascinated.
This was what Anarchism made of men like the cynical Emile. It had never occurred to her before that even Sobrenski, whom she regarded solely as a brutal task-master, was himself a living sacrifice.
She drowsed and brooded through the day, and having arrived at Emile's room and finding it empty, she "prowled," as she herself would have expressed it, among his few belongings, for she possessed a very feminine curiosity. Under a pile of loose music she found the portrait of a little blond woman, beautiful of curve and outline, in a lace robe that could only have been made in Paris or Vienna.
The picture was signed Marie Roumanoff, and on the back was written "Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse!" There were songs too scrawled with love-messages in Emile's handwriting.
She pored over them with a vivid interest quite unmingled with any thought of jealousy. Emile always said that no revolutionist ever wasted time or thought on women.
After all, if she were shot to-morrow who would care? She had written to her people and sent them photographs and newspapers with the accounts of her triumph.