As the young fellow sat there watching her, all the petty gossip of Europe came back to him—anecdotes, panegyrics, eulogies, scandals, stage chatter, Quarter “divers,” paid réclames—all that he had ever read and heard about this notorious young girl, now seated there 52 across the table, with her pretty head framed by slender, unjewelled fingers. He remembered the gems she had worn that June night, a year ago, and their magnificence.
“Well,” she said, “life is a pleasantry, a jest, a bon-mot flung over his shoulder by some god too drunk with nectar to invent a better joke. Life is an Olympian epigram made between immortal yawns. What do you think of my epigram, Garry?”
“I think you are just as clever and amusing as I remember you, Nihla.”
“Amusing to you, perhaps. But I don’t entertain myself very successfully. I don’t think poverty is a very funny joke. Do you?”
“Poverty!” he repeated, smiling his unbelief.
She smiled too, displayed her pretty, ringless hands humorously, for his inspection, then framed her oval face between them again and made a deliberate grimace.
“All gone,” she said. “I am, as you say, here on my uppers.”
“I can’t understand, Nihla——”
“Don’t try to. It doesn’t concern you. Also, please forget me as Nihla Quellen. I told you that I’ve taken my sister’s name, Thessalie Dunois.”
“But all Europe knows you as Nihla Quellen——”