"La lunga man d'ogni bellezza piena…."
—the long delicate hands on which two tears had fallen.
He sat down again, and she recovered herself and calmly went on with her story:
An author had at last launched her. He had discovered in the strange little creature a daimon, a genius,—and, even better for his purpose, "a dramatic type, a new woman, representative of an epoch." Of course, he made her his mistress after so many others had done the same. And she let him take her, as she had suffered the others, without love, and even with the opposite of love. But he had made her famous: and she had done the same for him.
"And now," said Christophe, "the others cannot do anything to you: you can do what you like with them."
"You think so?" she said bitterly.
Then she told him of Fate's other mockery,—her passion for a knave whom she despised: a literary man who had exploited her, had plucked out the most sorrowful secrets of her soul, and turned them into literature, and then had left her.
"I despise him," she said, "as I despise the dirt on my boots: and I tremble with rage when I think that I love him, that he has but to hold up his finger, and I should go running to him, and humble myself before such a cur. But what can I do? I have a heart that will never love what my mind desires. And I am compelled alternately to sacrifice and humiliate one or the other. I have a heart: I have a body. And they cry out and cry out and demand their share of happiness. And I have nothing to curb them with, for I believe in nothing. I am free…. Free? I am the slave of my heart and my body, which often, almost always, in spite of myself, desire and have their will. They carry me away, and I am ashamed. But what can I do?…"
She stopped for a moment, and mechanically moved the cinders in the fire with the tongs.
"I have read in books," she said, "that actors feel nothing. And, indeed, those whom I meet are nearly all conceited, grown-up children who are never troubled by anything but petty questions of vanity. I do not know if it is they who are not true comedians, or myself. I fancy it must be I. In any case, I pay for the others."