"Tell me, how do you like me?" she eagerly cried, clasping his hand with both hers. There was no reserve between these two--if, indeed, propinquity had not established complete freedom from what Victor termed _gêne_ long ago--and she gazed up into his face with eyes transparent, shining, darkly blue as sapphires, eyes so brilliant that in admiring them he hardly noticed the coarse red and white grease paint which thickly coated her delicate skin, or the bistre rings around those beautiful orbs. "Victor! Speak! If you are not satisfied, I shall chuck the profession--dearly as I love my work, I couldn’t stand it!" "Silly child!" He patted her hand, and looked round for a seat. There were two broken chairs in the large, bare, cellar-like "dressing-room," with its high window shrouded by a torn and dirty red curtain and its dresser-like table with looking-glasses the worse for wear under the flaring gas jets. But he shook his head at them. "I’ll sit here," he said, perching himself on one of the big dress-baskets under the pegs hung with feminine garments. "By George! what a room for a future Lady Macbeth to dress in, to be sure! My dear, don’t gasp! That’s your style, tragedy, melodrama, bloodcurdling! You’re a damned passionate little witch, that’s what you are--and I expected as much." She gave him a rapturous glance as she drew a deep sigh of relief and satisfaction, and sank in a graceful, unstudied attitude upon one of the crippled Windsor chairs; and he dryly lighted a cigarette, and gazed critically at her. She was very fair! Small, with an oval face under glossy masses of dark silken hair; slight and graceful, with a child’s hands and feet, and a tiny waist; yet the shoulders rising from her blue ball-dress with its gaudy wreaths of pink flowers were softly rounded--and the contour of neck and bust he considered "simply perfect." He ground his teeth and spat viciously on the blackened boards--there were only pieces of old carpeting here and there--as he remembered his wife--and her supposed lover, "Lord Vansittart." "What a cursed shame!" he thought. "They wallow in wealth--and I and this child--bah! there is something to be said for anarchy, after all!" "You look--well, I feel I should like to kiss you," he grimly said. She blushed under her paint. Since her woman’s love had waxed so strong, all the former boy-and-girl intimacy went for nothing--she was shy of him. "If you did you would spoil my ’make-up’ and would get a dab or two of paint on your nose," she said, with slight embarrassment. It was just that coy fear of him in the abandonment of her passionate love which fired Victor Mercier when he was near her. Fierce though his mingled desire of, and hatred for, Joan had been, and still was, she had never thrilled him, stirred his whole nature, as this girl, the companion of his youth, had the power to do.