"I guess you enjoyed yourself," said Morera, in a satisfied voice, when at last they found a carriage and leaned back to breathe the gentle night air.

"I enjoyed myself thoroughly," said Sylvia.

"Dat's the way to see a bit of life," he declared. "What's the good of sitting in a b.u.m theater all the night? Dat don't amuse me any. I plugged him in the leg," he added, in a tone of almost tender reminiscence.

Sylvia expressed surprise at his knowing where he had hit him, and Morera was very indignant at the idea of her supposing that he should shoot a man without knowing exactly at what part of him he was aiming and where he should hit him.

"Why, I might have killed him dead," he added. "I didn't want to kill a man dead just for a bit of fun. I started them guys off, see. They thought they'd got a slob. Dat's where I was laughing. I guess I'll sleep good to-night."

Sylvia spent a month seeing life with Carlos Morera; though she never had another experience so exciting as the first, she pa.s.sed a good deal of her time upon the verge of melodramatic adventure. She grew fond of this child-like creature with his spendthrift ostentation and bravado. He never showed the least sign of wanting to make love to her, and demanded nothing from Sylvia but overdressing and admiration of his exploits. At the end of the month he told Sylvia that business called him to New York and invited her to come with him. He let her understand, however, that now he wanted her as his mistress. Even if she could have tolerated the idea, Sylvia was sure that from the moment she accepted such a position he would begin to despise her. She had heard too many of his contemptuous references to the women he had bought. She refused to accompany him, on the plea of wanting to go back to Europe. Morera looked sullen, and she had a feeling that he was regretting the amount he had spent upon her. Her pride found such a sensation insupportable and she made haste to return him all his jewels.

"Say, what sort of a guy do you think I am?" He threw the jewels at her feet and left her like a spoiled child.

An hour or two later he came back with a necklace that must have cost five thousand dollars.

"Dat's the sort of guy I am," he said, and would take no refusal from her to accept it.

"You can't go on spending money for nothing like this," Sylvia protested.

"I got plenty, ha'n't I?" he asked.

She nodded.

"And I believe it's my money, ain't it?" he continued.

She nodded again.

"Well, dat finishes dat argument right away. Now I got another proposition. You listening? I got a proposition dat we get married. I believe I 'ain't met no girl like you. I know you've been a cabaret girl. Dat don't matter a cent to me. You're British. Well, I've always had a kind of notion I'd like to marry a British girl. Don't you tink I'm always the daffy guy you've b.u.mmed around with in Buenos Aires. You saw me in dat dancing-saloon? Well, I guess you know what I can do. Dat's what I am in business. Say, Sylvia, will you marry me?"

She shook her head.

"My dear old son, it wouldn't work for you or for me."

"I don't see how you figure dat out."

"I've figured it out to seventy times seven. It wouldn't do. Not for another mad month even. Come, let's say good-by. I want to go to Europe. I'm going to have a good time. It'll be you that's going to give it to me. My dear old Carlos, you may have spent your money badly from your point of view, but you haven't really. You never spent any money better in all your life."

Morera did not bother her any more. With all his exterior foolishness he had a very deep perception of individual humanity. There was a boat sailing for Ma.r.s.eilles in a day or two, and he bought a ticket for Sylvia.

"It's a return ticket," he told her. "It's good for a year."

She a.s.sured him that even if she came back it could never be to marry him, but he insisted upon her keeping it, and to please him she yielded.

Sylvia left the Argentine worth nearly as much as Lily when she went away from Brazil, and as if her luck was bent upon an even longer run, she gained heavily at poker all the way back across the Atlantic.

When she reached Ma.r.s.eilles, Sylvia conceived a longing to meet Valentine again, and she telegraphed to Elene at Brussels for her address. It was with a quite exceptional antic.i.p.ation that Sylvia asked the concierge if Madame Lataille was in. While she walked up-stairs to her sister's apartment she remembered how she had yearned to be friends with Valentine nearly thirteen years ago, forgetting all about the disappointment of her hope in a sudden desire to fill up a small corner of her present loneliness.

Valentine had always lingered in Sylvia's imagination as a rather wild figure, headstrong to such a pitch where pa.s.sion was concerned that she herself had always felt colorless and insignificant in comparison. There was something splendidly tropical about Valentine as she appeared to Sylvia's fancy; in all the years after she quitted France she had cherished a memory of Valentine's fiery anger on the night of her departure as something n.o.bly independent.

Like other childish memories, Sylvia found Valentine much less impressive when she met her again--much less impressive, for instance, than Elene, who, though she had married a shopkeeper and had settled down to a most uncompromising and ordinary respectability, retained a ripening outward beauty that made up for any pinching of the spirit. Here was Valentine, scarcely even pretty, who achieved by neatness any effect of personality that she did. She had fine eyes--it seemed impossible for any of her mother's children to avoid them, however dull and inexpressive might have been the father's. Sylvia was thinking of Henry's eyes, but what she had heard of M. Lataille in childhood had never led her to picture him as more remarkable outwardly than her own father.

"Twelve years since we met," Valentine was murmuring, and Sylvia was agreeing and thinking to herself all the time how very much compressed Valentine was, not uncomfortably or displeasingly, but like a new dress before it has blossomed to the individuality of the wearer. There recurred to Sylvia out of the past a likeness between Valentine and Maudie Tilt when Maudie had dressed up for the supper-party with Jimmy Monkley.

When the first reckonings of lapsed years were over there did not seem much to talk about, but presently Sylvia described with much detail the voyage from La Plata to Ma.r.s.eilles, just as, when one takes up a long-interrupted correspondence, great attention is often devoted to the weather at the moment.

"Alors, vous etes chanteuse?" Valentine asked.

"Oui, je suis chanteuse," Sylvia replied.

Neither of the sisters used the second person singular: the conversation, which was desultory, like the conversation of travelers in a railway carriage, ended abruptly as if the train had entered a tunnel.

"Vous etes tres-bien ici," said Sylvia, looking round. The train had emerged and was running through a dull cutting.

"Oui, je suis tres-bien ici," Valentine replied.

There was no hostility between the sisters; there was merely a blank, a sundering stretch of twelve years, that dismayed both of them with its tracklessness. Presently Sylvia noticed a photograph upon the wall so conspicuously framed as to justify a supposition that it represented the man who was responsible for Valentine's well-being.

"Oui, c'est mon amant," said Valentine, in reply to the unspoken question.

Sylvia was faced by the problem of commenting satisfactorily upon a photograph. To begin with, it was one of those photographs that preserve the individual hairs of the mustache but eradicate every line from the face. It was impossible to comment on it, and it would have been equally impossible to comment on the original in person. The only fact emerging from the photograph was that in addition to a mustache the subject of it owned a pearl tie-pin; but even of the genuineness of the pearl it was unable to give any a.s.surance.

"Photographs tell one nothing, do they?" Sylvia said, at last. "They're like somebody else's dreams."

Valentine knitted her brows in perplexity.

"Or somebody else's baby," Sylvia went on, desperately.

"I don't like babies," said Valentine.

"Vraiment on est tres-bien ici," said Sylvia.

She felt that by flinging an accentuated compliment to the room Valentine might feel her lover was included in the approbation.

"And it's mine," said Valentine, complacently. "He bought it for me. C'est pour la vie."

Pa.s.sion might be quenched in the slough of habitude; love's pinions might molt like any farm-yard hen's. What was that, when the apartment was hers for life?

"How many rooms have you?" Sylvia asked.

"Besides this one I have a bedroom, a dining-room, a kitchen, and a bath-room. Would you like to see the bath-room?"

When Valentine asked the last question she was transformed; a latent exultation flamed out from her immobility.

"I should love to see the bath-room," said Sylvia. "I think bath-rooms are often the most interesting part of a house."

"But this is an exceptional bath-room. It cost two thousand francs to install."

Valentine led the way to the admired chamber, to which a complicated arrangement of shining pipes gave an orchestral appearance. Valentine flitted from tap to tap. Aretino himself could scarcely have imagined more methods of sprinkling water upon the human body.

"And these pipes are for warming the towels," she explained. It was a relief to find pipes that led a comparatively pa.s.sive existence amid such a convolution of fountainous activity.

"I thought while I was about it that I would have the tiles laid right up to the ceiling," Valentine went on, pensively. "And you see, the ceiling is made of looking-gla.s.s. When the water is very hot, ca fait drole, tu sais, on ne se voit plus."

It was the first time she had used the second person singular; the bath-room had created in Valentine something that almost resembled humanity.

"Yes," Sylvia agreed. "I suppose that is the best way of making the ceiling useful."

"C'est pour la vie," Valentine contentedly sighed.

"But if he were to marry?" Sylvia ventured.

"It would make no difference," Valentine answered. "I have saved money and with a bath-room like this one can always get a good rent. Everything in the apartment is mine, and the apartment is mine, too."

"Alors, tu es contente?" said Sylvia.

"Oui, je suis contente," said Valentine.

"Elle est jolie, ta salle de bain."

"Oui, elle est jolie comme un amour," Valentine a.s.sented, with a sweet maternal smile.

They talked of the bath-room for a while when they came back to the boudoir; Sylvia was conscious of displaying the politeness with which one descends from the nursery at an afternoon call.

"Enfin," said Sylvia, "Je file."

"Tu pars tout de suite de Ma.r.s.eilles?"

"Oui, je pars ce soir."

She had not really intended to leave Ma.r.s.eilles that evening, but there seemed no reason to stay.

"C'est dommage que tu n'as pas vu Louis."

"Il s'appelle Louis?"

"Oui, il s'appelle Louis. Il est a Lyon pour ses affaires."

"Alors, au revoir, Valentine."

"Au revoir, Sylvie."

They hesitated, both of them, to see which would offer her cheek first; in the end they managed to be simultaneous.

"Even the farewell was a stalemate," Sylvia said to herself on the way down-stairs.

She wondered, while she was walking back to her hotel, what was going to be the pa.s.sion of her own life. One always started out with a dim conception of perfect love, however one might scoff at it openly in self-protection, but evidently it by no means followed that love for a man, let alone perfect love, would ever arrive. Lily had succeeded in inspiring at least one man with love for her, but she had found her own pa.s.sion in roulette with Camacho tacked to it, inherited like a husband's servant, familiar with any caprice, but jealous and irritable. Valentine had found her grand pa.s.sion in a bath-room that satisfied even her profoundest maternal instincts. Dorothy had loved a coronet with such fervor that she had been able to abandon everything that could smirch it. Sylvia's own mother had certainly found at thirty-four her grand pa.s.sion, but Sylvia felt that it would be preferable to fall in love with a bath-room now than wait ten years for a Henry.

Sylvia reached the hotel, packed up her things, and set out to Paris without any definite plans in her head for the future, and just because she had no definite plans and nothing to keep her from sleeping, she could not sleep and tossed about on the wagon-lit half the night.

"It's not as if I hadn't got money. I'm amazingly lucky. It's really fantastic luck to find somebody like poor old Carlos to set me up for five years of luxurious independence. I suppose if I were wise I should buy a house in London--and yet I don't want to go back to London. The trouble with me is that, though I like to be independent, I don't like to be alone. Yet with Michael.... But what's the use of thinking about him? Do I actually miss him? No, certainly not. He's nothing more to me than something I might have had, but failed to secure. I'm regretting a missed experience. If one loses somebody like that, it leaves a sense of incompletion. How often does one feel a quite poignant regret because one has forgotten to finish a cup of coffee; but the regret is always for the incomplete moment; it doesn't endure. Michael in a year will have changed; I've changed, also. There is nothing to suggest that if we met again now, we should meet in the same relation, with the same possibility in the background of our intercourse. Then why won't I go back to Mulberry Cottage? Obviously because I have out-lived Mulberry Cottage. I don't want to stop my course by running into a backwater that's already been explored. I want to go on and on until ... yes, until what? I can travel now, if I want to. Well, why shouldn't I travel? If I visit my agent in Paris--and I certainly shall visit him in order to tell him what I think of the management of that d.a.m.ned Casino at Rio--he'll offer me another contract to sing in some outlandish corner of the globe, and if I weren't temporarily independent, I should have to accept it with all its humiliations. Merely to travel would be a mistake I think. I've got myself into the swirl of mountebanks, and somehow I must continue with them. It's a poor little loyalty, but even that is better than nothing. Really, if one isn't tied down by poverty, one can have a very good time, traveling the world as a singer. Or I could live in Paris for a while. I should soon meet amusing people. Oh, I don't know what I want. I should rather like to get hold of Olive again. She may be married by now. She probably is married. She's bound to be married. A superfluity of romantic affection was rapidly acc.u.mulating that must have been deposited somewhere by now. I might get Gainsborough out from England to come with me. Come with me, where? It seems a shame to uproot the poor old thing again. She's nearly sixty. But I must have somebody."

When Sylvia reached Paris she visited two trunks that were in a repository. Among other things she took out the volume of Adlington's Apuleius.

"Yes, there's no doubt I'm still an a.s.s," she said. "And since the Argentine really a golden a.s.s; but oh, when, when, when shall I eat the rose-leaves and turn into Sylvia again? One might make a joke about that, as the White Knight said, something about Golden and Silver and Argentine."

Thinking of jokes reminded Sylvia of Mr. Pluepott, and thinking of Alice through the looking-gla.s.s brought back the Vicar. What a long way off they seemed.

"I can't let go of everybody," she cried. So she telegraphed and wrote urgently to Mrs. Gainsborough, begging her to join her in Paris. While she was waiting for a reply, she discussed projects for the future with her agent, who, when he found that she had some money, was anxious for her to invest a certain amount in the necessary reclame and appear at the Folies Bergeres.

"But I don't want to make a success by singing French songs with an English accent," Sylvia protested. "I'd as soon make a success by singing without a roof to my mouth. You discouraged me from doing something I really wanted to do. All I want now is an excuse for roaming."

"What about a tour in Spain?" the agent suggested. "I can't get you more than ten francs a night, though, if you only want to sing. Still, Spain's much cheaper than America."

"Mon cher ami, j'ai besoin du travail pour me distraire. Ten francs is the wage of a slave, but pocket-money, if one is not a slave."

"Vous avez de la veine, vous."

"Vraiment?"

"Mais oui."

"Peut-etre quelqu'un m'a plaque."

He tried to look grave and sympathetic.

"Salaud," she mocked. "Crois-tu que je t'en dirais. Bigre! je creverais plutot."

She had dropped into familiarity of speech with him, but he, still hopeful of persuading her to intrust a profitable reclame to him, continued to treat her formally. Sylvia realized the arriere pensee and laughed at him.

"Je ne suis pas encore en grande vedette, tu sais."

He a.s.sured her that such a triumph would ultimately come to her, and she scoffed.

"Mon vieux, si je n'avais pas de la galette, je pourrais crever de faim devant ta porte. Ce que tu me dis, c'est du chic."

"Well, will you go to Spain?"

The contract was signed.

A day or two later, when she was beginning to give up hope of getting an answer from Mrs. Gainsborough, the old lady herself turned up at the hotel, looking not a minute older.

"You darling and daring old plesiosaurus," cried Sylvia, seizing her by the hand and twirling her round the vestibule.

"Yes, I am pleased to see you and no mistake," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "But what a tyrant! Well, really, I was in me bed when your telegram came and that boy he knocked like a tiger. Knock--knock! all the time I was trying to slip on me petticoat, which through me being in a regular fl.u.s.ter I put on wrong way up and got me feet all wound up with the strings. Knock--knock! 'Whatever do you think you're doing?' I said when at last I was fairly decent and went to open the door. 'Telegram,' he says, as saucy as bra.s.s. 'Telegram?' I said. 'I thought by the row you was making that you was building St. Paul's Cathedral.' 'Wait for the answer?' he said. 'Answer?' I said. 'Certainly not.' Well, there was I with your telegram in one hand and me petticoat slipping down in the other. Then on the top of that came your letter, and I couldn't resist a sight of you, my dearie. Fancy that Lily waltzing off like that. And with a Portuguese. She'll get Portuguese before he's finished with her. Portuguese is what she'll be. And the journey! Well, really, I don't know how I managed. I kept on saying, 'France,' the same as if I was asking a policeman the way to Oxford Circus, and they bundled me about like ... well, really, everybody was most kind. Still when I got to France, it wasn't much use going on shouting 'France' to everybody. However, I met a nice young fellow in the train, and he very thoughtfully a.s.sisted me into a cab and ... well, I am glad to see you."

"Now you're coming with me to Spain," Sylvia announced.

"Good land alive! Where?"