Mrs. Delamere did not reply. She rose and gathered her gloves and fan from a table where they were lying, and then came calmly up to Minna’s chair. “You are overdone. It is time for bed.”
She was not without kindly instincts. In her placid, well-bred way, she stooped and put her arm beneath Minna’s and helped her to rise. She stood for a moment without withdrawing her arm.
“You are leading a weary life, my poor child,” she said.
Minna looked at her for a minute. Her lips quivered.
“Oh! a hell of a life,” she whispered.
And to Mrs. Delamere’s consternation, the girl gave one or two little convulsive sobs and, turning swiftly, burst into miserable crying upon her shoulder.
“I wish I were dead. I can’t find peace or happiness anywhere. It is a hell of a life!”
The elder woman soothed her as best she could. Eventually Minna dried her eyes, kissed, for the first time, her friend’s faded cheek, and went out of the room.
“Why is it,” said Mrs. Delamere to herself, “that when a woman wants to go to the devil, she always does so by water?”
Gerard was up early the next morning, and after enquiries went in search of a respectable turn-out for the proposed drive. He found a high American phaeton and a pair of Irish ponies which the livery stable keeper had recently purchased from a dissipated young Englishman who, having ruined himself at the tables, had hurriedly hastened to England to enlist in a foot regiment. On returning towards the Public Gardens, he encountered his club acquaintance sitting outside the Café de la Victoire. He joined him in an apéritif, described his recent hire. The friend smiled indulgently.