The girl shook her head:
"You don't yet understand. In our café the French Government compels us to spy on certain strangers and to report whatever we can discover. Always it disgusted me to do such a thing. Now I shall not be obliged to do it any more, because I am never going back to the Cabaret de Biribi."
"Do you mean to say that you and Monsieur Wildresse are in the secret service of your Government?" he asked, astonished.
"That is too dignified an explanation. I have been an informer since I was seventeen."
"A—a paid informer?"
"I don't know whether the Government pays Monsieur Wildresse."
"But he doesn't do such things for the pleasure of doing them."
"Pleasure? It is an abominable profession! It is unclean."
"Then why do you do it?" he demanded, amazed.
"I am not perfectly sure why. I know that the Patron is afraid of the Government. That, I suppose, is why we have been obliged to take orders from them."