“A bas la romance et l’idylle, Les 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 dos!” 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, alas! 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 is the most fatal of all sentiments, the most deadly of all 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 amused myself wherever amusement could be obtained, but I still remained, as I had always been from those sweet well-remembered days at the gray old convent in Florence, an honest woman. At Monte Carlo the scum of the earth enjoy the flowers of the earth. I detested its crowds; I held in abhorrence that wild, 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. I returned to Nice with a feeling that for me, now that Ernest had drifted from me to become a placid gambler and was indifferent, life had no further charm. The recollection of the days that followed can never be torn from my memory, my brain, my soul. I smiled, though I was wearing out my heart; I laughed even though bitter tears were ready to start to my eyes, and I made pretence of being interested in things to which I was at heart supremely indifferent. I courted forgetfulness, but the oblivion of my love would not come. I never knew till then how great was the passion a woman could conceive for a man, or how his memory could ever arise, a ghost from the past to terrify the present. That night as we drove from the station to the hotel Ulrica accidentally touched my hand. “How cold you are, dear!” she cried in surprise. “Yes,” I answered, shivering. I was cold; it was the truth. At thought of the man who had forsaken me an icy chill had struck my heart--the chill of unsatisfied love, of desolation, of blank, unutterable despair.