“Oh, that! . . . Madame is like a child.” It was impossible to get the bearing of that utterance from that girl who, as Doña Rita herself had told me, was the most taciturn of human beings; and yet of all human beings the one nearest to herself. I seized her head in my hands and turning up her face I looked straight down into her black eyes which should have been lustrous. Like a piece of glass breathed upon they reflected no light, revealed no depths, and under my ardent gaze remained tarnished, misty, unconscious. “Will Monsieur kindly let me go. Monsieur shouldn’t play the child, either.” (I let her go.) “Madame could have the world at her feet. Indeed she has it there only she doesn’t care for it.” How talkative she was, this maid with unsealed lips! For some reason or other this last statement of hers brought me immense comfort. “Yes?” I whispered breathlessly. “Yes! But in that case what’s the use of living in fear and torment?” she went on, revealing a little more of herself to my astonishment. She opened the door for me and added: “Those that don’t care to stoop ought at least make themselves happy.” I turned in the very doorway: “There is something which prevents that?” I suggested. “To be sure there is. _Bonjour_, Monsieur.” PART FOUR CHAPTER I “Such a charming lady in a grey silk dress and a hand as white as snow. She looked at me through such funny glasses on the end of a long handle. A very great lady but her voice was as kind as the voice of a saint. I have never seen anything like that. She made me feel so timid.” The voice uttering these words was the voice of Therese and I looked at her from a bed draped heavily in brown silk curtains fantastically looped up from ceiling to floor. The glow of a sunshiny day was toned down by closed jalousies to a mere transparency of darkness. In this thin medium Therese’s form appeared flat, without detail, as if cut out of black paper. It glided towards the window and with a click and a scrape let in the full flood of light which smote my aching eyeballs painfully. In truth all that night had been the abomination of desolation to me. After wrestling with my thoughts, if the acute consciousness of a woman’s existence may be called a thought, I had apparently dropped off to sleep only to go on wrestling with a nightmare, a senseless and terrifying dream of being in bonds which, even after waking, made me feel powerless in all my limbs. I lay still, suffering acutely from a renewed sense of existence, unable to lift an arm, and wondering why I was not at sea, how long I had slept, how long Therese had been talking before her voice had reached me in that purgatory of hopeless longing and unanswerable questions to which I was condemned.