Ah! I trembled when I realised how madly I loved him, and how fierce was my hatred of that woman who issued her orders and whom he obeyed.
I turned away with the Allens, and Ulrica cried delightedly that she had won on 16, her favourite number. But I did not answer. My heart had grown sick, and I went forth into the healing night air and down the steps towards the ascenseurs.
On the steps a well-dressed young Frenchman was lounging, and as I passed down I heard him humming to himself that catchy chanson so popular at the café-concert:
"A bas la romance et l'idylle,
Lea oiseaux, la forêt, le buisson
Des marlous, de la grande ville,
Nous allons chanter la chanson!
V'la les dos, viv'nt les dos!
C'est les dos les gros,
Les beaux,
A nous les marmites!
Grandes ou petites;
V'la les dos, viv'nt les dos;
C'est les dos les gros,
Les beaux,
A nous les marmit' et vivent les los!"
I closed my ears to shut out the sound of those words. I remembered Ernest—that look in his eyes, that scorn in his face, that disdain in his bearing.
The truth was only too plain. His love for me was dead. I was the most wretched of women, of all God's creatures.
I prayed that I might regard him—that I might regard the world—with indifference. And yet I was sufficiently acquainted with the world and its ways to know that to a woman the word indifference is the most evil word in the language; that it bears upon the most fatal of all sentiments; that it brings about the most deadly of all mental attitudes.
But Ernest, the man whose slave I was, despised me. He commanded my love; why could not I command his? Ah, because I was a woman—and my face had ceased to interest him!
Bitter tears sprang to my eyes, but I managed to preserve my self-control and enter the station-lift, making an inward vow that never again, in my whole life, would I set foot in that hated hell within a paradise called Monte Carlo.
True, I was a woman who, abandoned by the man she loved, amused herself wherever amusement could be procured; but I still remained an honest woman, as I had always been ever since those sweet and well-remembered days spent in the grey old convent outside Florence. At Monte Carlo the scum of the earth enjoy the flowers of the earth. I detested its crowds; I held in abhorrence that turbulent avarice, and felt stifled in that atmosphere of gilded sin. No! I would never enter there again. The bitter remembrance of that night would, I knew, be too painful.