"You don't want me to, my girl? . . . Have it your own way! Look after yourself! I'm all right! . . . Everyone for himself, and that for the others! After all, if the fool is suffering, it's her own fault! Why is she always so ridiculously serious?"
(That was what they were all thinking.)
Annette ended by withdrawing from the combat. Sylvie and Tullio were getting up a program of tableaux, in which Sylvie could show off all her charms, and a few more besides. . . . (She was a little Parisian magician who, with a shred of material, could transform herself into a series of "doubles," all much prettier than the original, but which, by completing that original, made it appear more charming than them all, since it gave birth to them all.) . . . To try to fight her on this ground would have been disastrous for Annette. She knew it only too well: she was beaten in advance; what would she have been afterwards? She asked to be left out of the entertainment, giving her health as an excuse: her ill appearance was excuse enough. And Tullio did not insist. Scarcely had she refused when she suffered the more at having retired fully armed from the battle. Even when hope is dead, a struggle engenders fresh hope. Now she had to leave Tullio and Sylvie alone together for a part of the day. In order to embarrass them she obliged herself to attend all the rehearsals. She didn't embarrass them much. On the contrary she stimulated them, especially that brazen girl, who insisted on rehearsing ten times a scene that showed the abduction of a fainting odalisque by a Byronian corsair with eyes of sombre fire, gnashing teeth,—fatal, feline, ready to leap like a jaguar. Tullio played the rôle as though he were going to put the whole Palace Hotel to fire and sword. As for Sylvie, she might have given points to the twenty thousand houris who hold the Prophet's beard in Paradise.
The evening of the performance arrived. Annette, hidden away in the last row of the hall, happily forgotten in the midst of the enthusiasm, could not stay until the end. She left in torture. Her head was afire; her mouth was bitter; she was chewing the cud of her suffering. Love scorned was gnawing at her vitals.
She went into the fields that surrounded the hotel; but she could not go far away, she kept circling around that lighted hall. The sun had set, darkness was falling. With an animal instinct she smelled out the door by which the two would certainly make their exit; a little side door that enabled the actors, without coming through the hall, to regain the dressing rooms in another wing of the building. They actually did come out, and before they had gone far they lingered in the shadow of the field to talk. Hidden behind a clump of trees, Annette could hear Sylvie laughing, laughing . . .
"No, no, not to-night!"
And Tullio was insisting: "Why not?"
"First of all, I want to sleep."
"There's plenty of time to sleep!"
"No, no, never enough! . . ."