She held up the unspeakable things and almost laughed as she threw them on the pavement, whence they were picked up carefully by a passing urchin—for nothing is wasted in France. “I would have wiped you clean with my—well, with anything I’ve got, in return for your having remembered my picture.” “Well,” said he, “the compliment being quite unconscious, was all the more sincere.” The waiter mopped up the flooded table. “Let us be depraved,” said Clementina in high good humour, “and have some green chartreuse.” “Willingly,” smiled Quixtus. So they were depraved. And when Clementina went to bed she wondered why she had railed at Quixtus all these years. CHAPTER XIX Clementina went to bed a happier woman than she had been for many a day. Distrusting the ministrations of the Chinese nurse, she had set up a little bed for Sheila in her own room. The child lay there fast asleep, the faithful Pinkie projecting from a folded arm in a staring and uncomfortable attitude of vigilance. Clementina’s heart throbbed as she bent over her. All that she had struggled for and had attained, mastery of her art, fame and fortune, shrank to triviality in comparison with this glorious gift of heaven. She remembered scornful words she had once spoken to Tommy: “Woman has always her sex hanging round the neck of her spirit.” She recognised the truth of the saying and thanked God for it. She undressed very quietly and walked about the room in stocking-feet, feeling a strange sacredness in the presence of the sleeping child. She was happier, too, in that she had forgiven Quixtus; for the first time since she had known him she felt a curiosity regarding him, a desire for his friendship; scarcely formulated, arose a determination to bring something vital into his life. As the notable housewife entering a forlorn man’s neglected house longs to throw open windows, shake carpets, sweep down cobwebs, abolish dingy curtains, and fill the place with sunlight and chintz and other gaiety, so did Clementina long to sweep and garnish Quixtus’s dusty heart. He had many human possibilities. After all, there must be something sound in a man who had treasured in his mind the memory of her picture. Sheila and herself, between them, would transform him into a gaunt angel. She fell asleep smiling at the thought.