“And then you go to Avricourt,” he said. “I suppose at least you know where that is?”
“It is on the route to Paris,” said I, keeping my temper. “Are we going direct to Paris?”
“Madame de Vassart desires to go there,” he said, glancing at her with a sort of sneaking deference which he now assumed in her presence.
“It is true,” said the Countess, turning to me. “I wish to rest for a little while before I go to Point Paradise. I am curiously tired of poverty, Monsieur Scarlett,” she added, and held out her shabby gloves with a gesture of despair; “I am reduced to very little—I have scarcely anything left,... and I am weak enough to long for the scent of the winter violets on the boulevards.”
With a faint smile she touched the bright hair above her brow, where the wind had flung a gleaming tendril over her black veil. 126
As I looked at her, I marvelled that she had found it possible to forsake all that was fair and lovely in life, to dare ignore caste, to deliberately face ridicule and insult and the scornful anger of her own kind, for the sake of the filthy scum festering in the sinkholes of the world.
There are brave priests who go among lepers, there are brave missionaries who dispute with the devil over the souls of half-apes in the Dark Continent. Under the Cross they do the duty they were bred to.
But she was bred to other things. Her lungs were never made to breathe the polluted atmosphere of the proletariat, yelping and slavering in their kennels; her strait young soul was never born for communion with the crooked souls of social pariahs, with the stunted and warped intelligence of fanatics, with the crippled but fierce minds which dominated the Internationale.
Not that such contact could ever taint her; but it might break her heart one day.
“You will think me very weak and cowardly to seek shelter and comfort at such a time,” she said, raising her gray eyes to me. “But I feel as though all my strength had slipped away from me. I mean to go back to my work; I only need a few days of quiet among familiar scenes—pleasant scenes that I knew when I was young. I think that if I could only see a single care-free face—only one among all those who—who once seemed to love me—”