“What has brought you here so early?” she said. “It’s not nine o’clock yet.”
The little Baroness, very pale, nervous and feverish, answered:
“I must speak to you. A dreadful thing has happened to me.”
“Come in, darling.”
She came in, they kissed; and the little Marquise climbed back into bed while the maid opened the windows, letting in air and light. Then, when the servant was gone, Mme. de Rennedon went on: “Now tell me.”
Mme. de Grangerie began to cry, shedding those pretty crystal drops that add so to a woman’s charm, and stammered—without drying her eyes, which would have made them red: “Oh, my dear, what’s happened to me is dreadful, too dreadful. I haven’t slept all night, not a minute: not one minute, I tell you. There, feel my heart, how it’s beating.”
And, taking her friend’s hand, she pressed it against her breast, on that firm rounded barrier that protects the hearts of women and is all that most men ask, so that they do not inquire what lies beneath it. Her heart was beating quite steadily.
She went on:
“It happened yesterday during the day … about four o’clock … or half past four. I don’t know the exact hour. You know all about my apartment, you know that my little first-floor drawing room, the one I always use, looks out on to the Rue Saint-Lazare, and that I adore sitting in the window to watch the people passing. The road to the station is so gay, so busy and full of people. … I love it. Well, yesterday I was sitting in the low chair I have drawn across my window; the window was open, and I was thinking of nothing at all: I was enjoying the fresh air. You remember how lovely it was yesterday.
“Suddenly, on the other side of the street, I saw another woman sitting at her window, a woman in a red dress; I was wearing mauve, don’t you know, my pretty mauve frock. I did not recognise the woman, a new tenant, who has only been in a month; and as it has rained for the last month I’d never seen her before. But I saw at once that she was no good. At first I was thoroughly disgusted and very shocked to see her sitting at the window just as I was doing; and then, gradually, I found it amusing to watch her. She was leaning on her elbows and she stared at the men, and the men stared at her, all of them, or almost all of them. You’d have thought something warned them as they got near the house, and they scented her out as dogs scent game, for they lifted their heads suddenly and exchanged quick glances with her, a freemasonry of glances. Hers said: ‘Won’t you?’
“Theirs answered: ‘No time,’ or ‘Another day,’ or ‘Not a cent,’ or ‘Take yourself out of sight, you hussy.’ This last phrase was signalled from the eyes of fathers of families.
“You can’t imagine how odd it was to watch her practising her wiles, or rather her profession.
“Sometimes she shut the window down quickly and I saw a gentleman turn in at the door. She had hooked him as a fisherman hooks a gudgeon. Then I took out my watch. They stayed a dozen or twenty minutes, never longer. I got wildly excited over her at last, spider that she is. And she wasn’t an ugly wench either.
“I wondered: What does she do to make herself so clearly, quickly and completely understood? Does she make a sign with her head or wave her hand as well as look at them?
“And I took my opera glasses to investigate the process. Oh, it was quite simple: first a glance, then a smile, then just the least inclination of the head that meant: ‘Are you coming up?’ But so slight, so casual and so discreet that one would have to be very clever to do it as well as she did.
“And I wondered: Could I do it as cleverly, that little upward tilt, bold and graceful? For it really was a graceful gesture.
“I went to my looking-glass and tried. My dear, I did it better than she did, much better. I was delighted; and I went back to my place in the window.
“She wasn’t getting anyone now, poor girl, not a single person. In fact she hadn’t the chance. It really must be dreadful, don’t you know, to earn your living like that, dreadful, and sometimes amusing, because the men one meets in the street aren’t so bad, after all.
“They were all walking along my pavement now, and not a single one on hers. The sun had come round. One after another they came, young and old, dark and fair, grey heads and white heads.
“I noticed some very charming ones, oh, very charming, my dear, much better than my husband or yours—your former husband, now you’ve divorced him. You can make your choice now.
“I said to myself: ‘If I, a virtuous woman, were to make them the sign, would they understand me?’ And then the mad longing took me to make them the sign—such a longing, like women get when they’re going to have a child … the maddest longing, don’t you know, the sort of longing one simply can’t resist. I feel like that sometimes. Don’t you think it’s silly? I believe we have the souls of monkeys, we women. I’ve been told (it was a doctor who told me) that the brain of a monkey is very like ours. We must always be imitating someone. We imitate our husbands, when we love them, during the honeymoon, and then after that our lovers, our friends, our confessors if we like them. We adopt their manner of thinking, their manner of speaking, their words, their gestures, everything about them. It’s silly.
“Well, when I’m too strongly tempted to do a thing, I always do it.
“So I said to myself: ‘Now, I’ll try it on one of them, just one,
