ONE of the habits that Sylvia had acquired on tour in France was card-playing; perhaps she inherited her skill from Henry, for she was a very good player. The game on the voyage was poker. Before they were through the Straits of Gibraltar Sylvia had lost five hundred francs; she borrowed five hundred francs from Lily and set herself to win them back. The sea became very rough in the Atlantic; all the passengers were seasick. The other four poker-players, who were theatrical folk, wanted to stop, but Sylvia would not hear of it; she was much too anxious about her five hundred francs to feel seasick. She lost Lily’s first five hundred francs and borrowed five hundred more. Lily began to feel less seasick now, and she watched the struggle with a personal interest. The other players, with the hope that Sylvia’s bad luck would hold, were so deeply concentrated upon maintaining their advantage that they too forgot to be seasick. The ship rolled, but the poker-players only left the card-room for meals in the deserted saloon. Sylvia began to win again. Blue skies and calmer weather appeared; the other poker-players had no excuse for not continuing, especially now that it was possible to play on deck. Sylvia had won back all she had lost and two hundred francs besides when the ship entered the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.

“I think I should like gambling,” Lily said, “if only one didn’t have to shuffle and cut all the time.”

The place where Sylvia was engaged to sing was one of those centers of aggregated amusement that exist all over the world without any particular characteristic to distinguish one from another, like the dinners in what are known as first-class hotels on the Continent. Everything here was more expensive than in Europe; even the roulette-boards had zero and double zero to help the bank. The tradition of Brazil for supplying gold and diamonds to the world had bred a familiarity with the external signs of wealth that expressed itself in overjeweled men and women, whose display one forgave more easily on account of the natural splendor of the scene with which they had to compete.

Lily, with the unerring bad taste that nearly always is to be found in sensuous and indolent women, to whom the obvious makes the quickest and easiest appeal, admired the flashing stones and stars and fireflies with an energy that astonished Sylvia, notwithstanding the novel glimpse she had been given of Lily’s character in the affair with Hector Ozanne. The climate was hot, but a sea breeze freshened the city after sunset; the enforced day-long inactivity, with the luxurious cool baths and competent negresses who attended upon her lightest movement, satisfied Lily’s conception of existence, and when they drove along the margin of the bay before dinner her only complaint was that she could not coruscate like other women in the carriages they passed.

With the money they had in hand Sylvia felt justified in avoiding a pension d’artistes, and they had taken a flat together. This meant that when Sylvia went to work at the cabaret, Lily, unless she came with her, was left alone, which did not at all suit her. Sylvia therefore suggested that she should accept an engagement to dance at midnight, with the stipulation that she should not be compelled to stay until 3 A.M. unless she wanted to, and that by foregoing any salary she should not be expected to drink gooseberry wine at 8,000 reis a bottle, on which she would receive a commission of 1,000 reis. The management knew what a charm the tall, fair English girl would exercise over the swart Brazilians, and was glad enough to engage her at her own terms. Sylvia had not counted upon Lily’s enjoying the cabaret life so much. The heat was affecting her much more than Lily, and she began to complain of the long hours of what for her was a so false gaiety. Nothing, however, would persuade Lily to go home before three o’clock at the earliest, and Sylvia, on whom a great lassitude and indifference had settled, used to wait for her, sitting alone while Lily danced the machiche.

One night, when Sylvia had sung two of her songs with such a sense of hopeless depression weighing her down that the applause which followed each of them seemed to her a mockery, she had a sudden vertigo from which she pulled herself together with a conviction that nothing would induce her to sing the third song. She went on the scene, seated herself at the piano, and to the astonishment and discomfort of the audience and her fellow-players, half chanted, half recited one of the eccentric Englishman’s poems about a body in the morgue. Such a performance in such a place created consternation, but in the silence that followed Sylvia fainted. When she came to herself she was back in her own bedroom, with a Brazilian doctor jabbering and mouthing over her symptoms. Presently she was taken to a clinic and, when she was well enough to know what had happened, she learned that she had yellow fever, but that the crisis had passed. At first Lily came to see her every day, but when convalescence was further advanced she gave up coming, which worried Sylvia intensely and hampered her progress. She insisted that something terrible had happened to Lily and worked herself up into such a state that the doctor feared a relapse. She was too weak to walk; realizing at last that the only way of escaping from the clinic would be to get well, she fought against her apprehensions for Lily’s safety and after a fortnight of repressed torments was allowed out. When Sylvia reached the flat she was met by the grinning negresses, who told her that Lily had gone to live elsewhere and let her understand that it was with a man.

Sylvia was not nearly well enough to reappear at the cabaret, but she went down that evening and was told by the other girls that Lily was at the tables. They were duly shocked at Sylvia’s altered appearance, congratulated her upon having been lucky enough to escape the necessity of shaving her head, and expressed their regrets at not knowing in which clinic she had been staying so that they might have brought her the news of their world. Sylvia lacked the energy to resent their hypocrisy and went to look for Lily, whom she found blazing with jewels at one of the roulette-tables.

There was something so fantastic in Lily’s appearance, thus bedecked, that Sylvia thought for a moment it was a feverish vision such as had haunted her brain at the beginning of the illness. Lily wore suspended from a fine chain round her neck a large diamond, one of those so-called blue diamonds of Brazil that in the moonlight seem like sapphires; her fingers flashed fire; a large brooch of rubies in the likeness of a butterfly winked somberly from her black corsage.

Sylvia made her way through the press of gamblers and touched Lily’s arm. So intent was she upon the tables that she brushed away the hand as if it had been a mosquito.

“Lily! Lily!” Sylvia called, sharply. “Where have you been? Where have you gone?”

At that moment the wheel stopped, and the croupier cried the number and the color in all their combinations. Sylvia was sure that he exchanged glances with Lily and that the gold piece upon the 33 on which he was paying had not been there before the wheel had stopped.

“Lily! Lily! Where have you been?” Sylvia called, again. Lily gathered in her winnings and turned round. It was curious how changed her eyes were; they seemed now merely like two more rich jewels that she was wearing.

“I’m sorry I’ve not been to see you,” she said. “My dear, I’ve won nearly four thousand pounds.”

“You have, have you?” Sylvia said. “Then the sooner you leave Brazil the better.”

Lily threw a swift glance of alarm toward the croupier, a man of almost unnatural thinness, who, while he intoned the invitation to place the stakes, fixed his eyes upon her.

“I can’t leave Brazil,” she said, in a whisper. “I’m living with him.”

“Living with a croupier?” Sylvia gasped.

“Hush! He belongs to quite a good family. He ruined himself. His name is Manuel Camacho. Don’t talk to me any more, Sylvia. Go away. He’s madly jealous. He wants to marry me.”

“Like Hector, I suppose,” Sylvia scoffed.

“Not a bit like Hector. He brings a priest every morning and says he’ll kill me and himself and the priest, too, if I don’t marry him. But I want to make more money, and then I will marry him. I must. I’m afraid of what he’ll do if I refuse. Go away from me, Sylvia, go away. There’ll be a fearful scene to-night if you will go on talking to me. Last night a man threw a flower into our carriage when we were driving home, and Manuel jumped out and beat him insensible with his cane. Go away.”

Sylvia demanded where she was living, but Lily would not tell her, because she was afraid of what her lover might do.

“He doesn’t even let me look out of the window. If I look out of the window he tears his clothes with rage and digs his finger-nails into the palms of his hands. He’s very violent. Sometimes he shoots at the chandelier.”

Sylvia began to laugh. There was something ridiculous in the notion of Lily’s leading this kind of lion-tamer’s existence. Suddenly the croupier with an angry movement swept a pile of money from the table.

“Go away, Sylvia, go away. I know he’ll break out in a moment. That was meant for a warning.”

Sylvia understood that it was hopeless to persist for the moment, and she made her way back to the cabaret. The girls were eager to know what she thought of Lily’s protector.

“Elle a de la veine, tu sais, la petite Lili. Elle l’a pris comme Ça, et il l’aime À la folie. Et elle gagne! mon Dieu, comme elle gagne! Tout va pour elle. Tu sais, elle a des brillants merveilleux. Ça fait riche, tu sais. Y’a pas de chic, mais il est jaloux! Il se porte comme un fou. Ça me raserait, tu sais, Être collÉe avec un homme pareil. Pourtant, elle est busineuse, la petite Lili! Elle ne lui donne pas un rond. Y’a pas de dos vert. Ah, non, elle est la vraie anglaise sans blague. Et le mec, dis, n’est-ce pas qu’il est maigre comme tout? On dirait un squelette.”

With all their depreciation of the croupier, it seemed to Sylvia that most of the girls would have been well pleased to change places with Lily. But how was she herself to regard the affair? During those long days of illness, when she had lain hour after hour with her thoughts, to what a failure her life had seemed to be turning, and what a haphazard, harborless course hers had seemed to be. Now she must perhaps jettison the little cargo she carried, or would it be fairer to say that she must decide whether she should disembark it? It was absurd to pretend that Michael would have viewed with anything but dismay the surrender of Lily to such a one as that croupier, and if she made that surrender, she would be violating his trust that counted for so much in her aimless career. Yet was she not attributing to Michael the sentiment he felt before Lily’s betrayal of him? He had only demanded of Sylvia that she should prevent Lily from drifting downward along the dull road of undistinguished ruin. If this fantastic Brazilian wished to marry her, why should he not do so? Then she herself should be alone indeed and, unless a miracle happened, should be lost in the eternal whirl of vagabonds to and fro across the face of the earth.

“They say one must expect to be depressed after yellow fever,” Sylvia reassured herself. “Perhaps this mood won’t last, but, oh, the endlessness of it all! How even one’s brush and comb seem weighed down by an interminable melancholy. As I look round me I can see nothing that doesn’t strike me as hopelessly, drearily, appallingly superfluous. The very soap in its china dish looks wistful. How pathetic the life of a piece of soap is, when one stops to contemplate it. A slow and steady diminution. Oh, I must do something to shake off this intolerable heaviness!”

The simplest and most direct path to energy and action seemed to be an attempt to interview Camacho, and the following evening Sylvia tried to make Lily divulge her address; but she begged not to be disturbed, and Sylvia, seeing that she was utterly absorbed by the play, had to leave her.

“Either I am getting flaccid beyond belief,” she said to herself, “or Lily has acquired an equally incredible determination. I think it’s the latter. It just shows what passion will do even for a Lily. All her life she has remained unmoved, until roulette reveals itself to her and she finds out what she was intended for. Of course I must leave her to her fierce skeleton; he represents the corollary to the passion. Queer thing, the way she always wins. I’m sure they’re cheating, somehow, the two of them. There’s the final link. They’ll go away presently to Europe, and Lily will enjoy the sweetest respectability that exists—the one that is founded on early indiscretion and dishonesty—a paradise preceded by the fall.”

Sylvia waited by the entrance to the roulette-room on the next night until play was finished, watched Lily come out with Camacho, and saw them get into a carriage and drive away immediately. None of the attendants or the other croupiers knew where Camacho lived, or, if they knew, they refused to tell Sylvia. On the fourth evening, therefore, she waited in a carriage by the entrance and ordered her driver to follow the one in which Lily was. She found that Camacho’s apartments were not so far from her own; the next morning she waited at the corner of the street until she saw him come out; then she rang the bell. The negress who opened the door shook her head at the notion of letting Sylvia enter, but the waiting in the sun had irritated her and she pushed past and ran up-stairs. The negress had left the upper door open, and Sylvia was able to enter the flat. Lily was in bed, playing with her jewels as if they were toys.

“Sylvia!” she cried, in alarm. “He’ll kill you if he finds you here. He’s gone to fetch the priest. They’ll be back in a moment. Go away.”

Sylvia said she insisted on speaking to Camacho; she had some good advice to give him.

“But he’s particularly jealous of you. The first evening you spoke to me ... look!” Lily pointed to the ceiling, which was marked like a die with five holes. “He did that when he came home to show what he would do to you.”

“Rubbish!” said Sylvia. “He’ll be like a lamb when we meet. If he hadn’t fired at the ceiling I should have felt much more alarmed for the safety of my head.”

“But, Sylvia,” Lily entreated. “You don’t know what he’s like. Once, when he thought a man nudged me, he came home and tore all the towels to pieces with his teeth. The servant nearly cried when she saw the room in the morning. It was simply covered with bits of towel, and he swallowed one piece and nearly choked. You don’t know what he’s like. I can manage him, but nobody else could.”

Here was a new Lily indeed, who dared to claim that she could manage somebody of whom Sylvia must be afraid. She challenged Lily to say when she had ever known her to flinch from an encounter with a man.

“But, my dear, Manuel isn’t English. When he’s in one of those rages he’s not like a human being at all. You can’t soothe him by arguing with him. You have to calm him without talking.”

“What do you use? A red-hot poker?”

Lily became agitated at Sylvia’s obstinacy, and, regardless of her jewels, which tinkled down into a heap on the floor, she jumped out of bed and implored her not to stay.

“I want to know one or two things before I go,” Sylvia said, and was conscious of taking advantage of Lily’s alarm to make her speak the truth, owing to the lack of time for the invention of lies.

“Do you love this man?”

“Yes, in a way I do.”

“You could be happy married to him?”

“Yes, when I’ve won five thousand pounds.”

“He cheats for you?”

Lily hesitated.

“Never mind,” Sylvia went on. “I know he does.”

“Oh, my dear,” Lily murmured, biting her lip. “Then other people might notice. Never mind. I ought to finish to-night. The boat sails the day after to-morrow.”

“And what about me?” Sylvia asked.

Lily looked shamefaced for a moment, but the natural optimism of the gambler quickly reasserted itself.

“I thought you wouldn’t like to break your contract.”

“My contract,” Sylvia repeated, bitterly. “What about—— Oh, but how foolish I am. You dear unimaginative creature!”

“I’m not at all unimaginative,” Lily interposed, quickly. “One of the reasons why I want to leave Brazil is because the black people here make me nervous. That’s why I left our flat. I didn’t know what to do. I was so frightened. I think I’m very imaginative. You got ill. What was I to do?”

She asked this like an accusation, and Sylvia knew that it would be impossible to make her see any other point of view.

“Besides, it was your fault I started to gamble. I watched you on the boat.”

“But you were going away without a word to me?” Sylvia could not refrain from tormenting herself with this question.

“Oh no, I was coming to say good-by, but you don’t understand how closely he watches me.”

The thought of Camacho’s jealous antics recurred to Lily with the imminence of his return; she begged Sylvia, now that all her questions were answered, to escape. It was too late; there was a sound of footsteps upon the stairs and the noise of angry voices above deep gobbles of protested innocence from the black servant.

The entrance reminded Sylvia of “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” for when Camacho came leaping into the room, as thin and active as a grasshopper, the priest was holding his coattails with one hand and with the other making the most operatic gestures of despair, like Don Basilio. In the doorway the black servant continued to gobble at everybody in turn, including the Almighty, to witness the clarity of her conscience.

“What language do you speak?” Sylvia asked, sharply, while Camacho was struggling to free himself from the restraint of the priest.

“I speak English! Gaddam! Hell! Five hundred hells!” the croupier shouted. “And I have sweared a swore that you will not interrupt between me myself and my Lili.”

Camacho raised his arm to shake his fist, and the priest caught hold of it, which made Camacho turn round and open on him with Portuguese expletives.

“When you’ve quite done cracking Brazil nuts with your teeth, perhaps you’ll listen to me,” Sylvia began.

“No, you hear me, no, no, no, no, no, no!” Camacho shouted. “And I will not hear you. I have heard you enough. You shall not take her away. Putain!”

“If you want to be polite in French,” Sylvia said. “Come along!

Tu comprends? Mais moi, je ne suis pas une femme qu’on rince.”

It was certainly improbable, Sylvia thought, that the croupier had understood much of Richepin’s verse, but the effect of the little recitation was excellent because it made him choke. Lily now intervened, and when Sylvia beheld her soothing the inarticulate Camacho by stroking his head, she abandoned the last faint inclination to break off this match and called upon the priest to marry them at once. No doubt the priest would have been willing to begin the ceremony if he had been able to understand a word of what Sylvia said, but he evidently thought she was appealing to him against Camacho’s violence, and with a view to affording the ultimate assistance of which he was capable he crossed himself and turned up his eyes to heaven.

“What an awful noise there is!” Sylvia cried, and, looking round her with a sudden realization of its volume, she perceived that the negress in the doorway had been reinforced by what was presumably the cook—another negress who was joining in her fellow-servant’s protestations. At the same time the priest was talking incessantly in rapid Portuguese; Camacho was probably swearing in the same language; and Lily was making a noise that was exactly half-way between a dove cooing and an ostler grooming a horse.

“Look here, Mr. Camacho,” Sylvia began.

“Oh, don’t speak to him, Sylvia,” Lily implored. “He can’t be spoken to when he’s like this. It’s a kind of illness, really.”

Sylvia paid no attention to her, but continued to address the croupier.

“If you’ll listen to me, Mr. Camacho, instead of behaving like an exasperated toy terrier, you’ll find that we both want the same thing.”

“You shall not have her,” the croupier chattered. “I will shoot everybody before you shall have her.”

“I don’t want her,” Sylvia screamed. “I’ve come here to be a bridesmaid or a godmother or any other human accessory to a wedding you like to mention. Take her, my dear man, she’s yours.”

At last Sylvia was able to persuade him that she was not to be regarded as an enemy of his matrimonial intentions, and after a final burst of rage directed against the negresses, whom he ejected from the room, as a housemaid turns a mattress, he made a speech:

“I am to marry Lily. We go to Portugal, where I am not to be a croupier, but a gentleman. I excuse my furage. You grant excusals, yes? It is a decomprehence.”

“He’s apologizing,” Lily explained in the kind of way one might call attention to the tricks of an intelligent puppy.

“She’s actually proud of him,” Sylvia thought. “But, of course, to her he represents gold and diamonds.”

The priest, who had grasped that the strain was being relaxed, began to exude smiles and to rub his hands; he sniffed the prospect of a fee so richly that one seemed to hear the notes crackle like pork. Camacho produced the wedding-ring that was even more outshone than wedding-rings usually are by the diamonds of betrothal.

“But I can’t be married in my dressing-gown,” Lily protested.

Sylvia felt inclined to say it was the most suitable garment, except a nightgown, that she could have chosen, but in the end, after another discussion, it was decided that the ecclesiastical ceremony should be performed to-morrow in church and that to-day should be devoted to the civil rite. Sylvia promised not to say a word about the departure to Europe.

Three days later Sylvia went on board the steamer to make her farewells. She gave Lily a delicate little pistol for a wedding-present; from Lily, in memory of her marriage, she received a box of chocolates.

It was impossible not to feel lonely, when Lily had gone: in three and a half years they had been much together. For a while Sylvia tried to content herself with the company of the girls in the pension d’artistes, to which she had been forced to go because the flat was too expensive for her to live in now. Her illness had swallowed up any money she had saved, and the manager took advantage of it to lower her salary. When she protested the manager told her he would be willing to pay the original salary, if she would go to SÃo Paulo. Though Sylvia understood that the management was trying to get the best of a bargain, she was too listless to care much and she agreed to go. The voyage there was like a nightmare. The boat was full of gaudy negroes who sang endlessly their mysterious songs; the smell was vile; the food was worse; cockroaches swarmed. SÃo Paulo was a squalid reproduction of Rio de Janeiro, and the women who sang in the cabaret were all seamed with ten years’ longer vagabondage than those at Rio. The men of SÃo Paulo treated them with the insolence of the half-breeds they all seemed. On the third night a big man with teeth like an ancient fence and a diamond in his shirt-front like a crystal stopper leaned over from a box and shouted to Sylvia to come up and join him when she had finished her songs; he said other things that made her shake with anger. When she left the scene, the grand pimp, who was politely known as the manager, congratulated Sylvia upon her luck: she had caught the fancy of the richest patron.

“You don’t suppose I’m going to see that goujat in his box?” she growled.

The grand pimp was in despair. Did she wish to drive away their richest patron? He would probably open a dozen bottles of champagne. He might ... the grand pimp waved his arms to express mental inability to express all the splendors within her grasp. Presently the impatient suitor came behind the scene to know the reason of Sylvia’s delay. He grasped her by the wrist and tried to drag her up to his box. She seized the only weapon in reach—a hand-glass—and smashed it against his face. The suitor roared; the grand pimp squealed; Sylvia escaped to the stage, which was almost flush with the main dancing-hall. She forced her way through the orchestra, kicking the instruments right and left, and fell into the arms of a man more resplendent than the rest, but a rastaquouÈre of more Parisian cut, who in a dago-American accent promised to plug the first guy that tried to touch her.

Sylvia felt like Carmen on the arm of the Toreador when she and her protector walked out of the cabaret. He was a youngish man, wearing a blue serge suit and high-heeled shoes half buckskin, half patent-leather, tied with white silk laces, so excessively American in shape that one looked twice to be sure he was not wearing them on the wrong feet. His trousers, after exhausting the ordinary number of buttons in front, prolonged themselves into a kind of corselet that drew attention to the slimness of his waist. He wore a frilled white shirt sown with blue hearts and a white silk tie with a large diamond pin. The back of his neck was shaved, which gave his curly black hair the look of a wig. He was the Latin dandy after being operated upon in an American barber shop, and his name was Carlos Morera.

Sylvia noted his appearance in such detail, because the appearance of anybody after that monster in the box would have come as a relief and a diversion. Morera had led her to a bar that opened out of the cabaret, and after placing two automatic pistols on the counter he ordered champagne cocktails for them both.

“He won’t come after you in here. Dat stiff don’t feel he would like to meet Carlos Morera. Say, do you know why? Why, because Carlos Morera’s ready to plug any stiff dat don’t happen to suit his fancy right away. Dat’s me, Carlos Morera. I’m pretty rich, I am. I’m a gentleman, I am. But dat ain’t going to stop me using those”; he indicated the pistols. “Drink up and let’s have another. Don’t you want to drink? See here, then.” He poured Sylvia’s cocktail on the floor. “Nothing won’t stop Carlos Morera if he wants to call another round of drinks. Two more champagne cocktails!”

“Is this going to be my Manuel?” Sylvia asked herself. She felt at the moment inclined to let him be anything rather than go back to the concert and face that man in the box.

“You’re looking some white,” Morera commented. “I believe he scared you. I believe I ought to have shot him. Say, you sit here and drink up. I t’ink I’ll go back and shoot him now. I sha’n’t be gone long.”

“Sit still, you fire-eater,” cried Sylvia, catching hold of his arm.

“Say, dat’s good. Fire-eater! Yes, I believe I’d eat fire if it came to it. I believe you could make me laugh. I’m going to Buenos Aires to-morrow. Why don’t you come along of me? This SÃo Paulo is a bum Brazilian town. You want to see the Argentine. I’ll show you lots of life.”

“Look here,” said Sylvia. “I don’t mind coming with you to make you laugh and to laugh myself, but that’s all. Understand?”

“Dat’s all right,” Carlos agreed. “I’m a funny kind of a fellow, I am. As soon as I found I could buy any girl I wanted, I didn’t seem to want them no more. ‘Sides, I’ve got seven already. You come along of me. I’m good company, I am. Everybody dat goes along of me laughs and has good fun. Hear that?”

He jingled the money in his pocket with a joyful reverence, as if he were ringing a sanctus-bell. “Now, you come back with me into the cabaret.”

Sylvia hesitated.

“Don’t you worry. Nobody won’t dare to look at you when you’re with me.”

Morera put her arm in his, and back they walked into the cabaret again, more than ever like Carmen with her Toreador. The grand pimp, seeing that Sylvia was safely protected, came forward with obeisances and apologies.

“See here. Bring two bottles of champagne,” Morera commanded.

The grand pimp beckoned authoritatively to a waiter, but Morera stood up in a fury.

“I didn’t tell you to bring a waiter. I told you to bring two bottles of champagne. Bring them yourself.”

The grand pimp returned very meekly with the bottles.

“Dat’s more like. Draw the cork of one.”

The grand pimp asked if he should put the other on ice.

“Don’t you worry about the other,” said Morera. “The other’s only there so I can break it on your damned head in case I get tired of looking at you. See what I mean?”

The grand pimp professed the most perfect comprehension.

“Well, this is a bum place,” Morera declared, after they had sat for a while. “I believe we sha’n’t get no fun here. Let’s quit.”

He drove her back to the pension, and the next day they took ship to La Plata for Buenos Aires.

Morera insisted on Sylvia’s staying at an expensive hotel and was very anxious for her to buy plenty of new evening frocks.

“I’ve got a fancy,” he explained, “to show you a bit of life. You hadn’t seen life before you came to Argentina.”

The change of air had made Sylvia feel much better, and when she had fitted herself out with new clothes, to which Morera added a variety of expensive and gaudy jewels, she felt quite ready to examine life under his guidance.

He took her to one or two theaters, to the opera, and to the casinos; then one evening he decided upon a special entertainment of which he made a secret.

“I want you to dress yourself up fine to-night,” he said. “We’re going to some smart ball. Put on all your jewelry. I’m going to dress up smart, too.”

Sylvia had found that overdressing was the best way of returning his hospitality; this evening she determined to surpass all previous efforts.

“Heavens!” she ejaculated, when she made the final survey of herself in the looking-glass. “Do I look more like a Christmas tree or a chemist’s shop?”

When she joined Morera in the lounge, she saw that he was in evening dress, with diamonds wherever it was possible to put them.

“You’re fine,” he said, contentedly. “Dat’s the way I like to see a goil look. I guess we’re going to have lots of fun to-night.”

They drank a good deal of champagne at dinner, and about eleven o’clock went out to their carriage. When the coachman was given the address of the ballroom, he looked round in surprise and was sworn at for his insolence, so with a shrug of the shoulders he drove off. They left the ordinary centers of amusement behind them and entered a meaner quarter where half-breeds and negroes predominated; at last after a very long drive they pulled up before what looked like a third-rate saloon. Sylvia hesitated before she got out; it did not seem at all a suitable environment for their conspicuous attire.

“We shall have lots of fun,” Morera promised. “This is the toughest dancing-saloon in Buenos Aires.”

“It looks it,” Sylvia agreed.

They entered a vestibule that smelt of sawdust, niggers, and raw spirits, and went up-stairs to a crowded hall that was thick with tobacco smoke and dust. A negro band was playing ragtime in a corner; all along one side of the hall ran a bar. The dancers were a queer medley. The men were mostly of the Parisian apache type, though naturally more swarthy; the women were mostly in black dresses, with shawls of brilliantly colored silk and tawdry combs in their black hair. There were one or two women dancing in coat and skirt and hat, whose lifted petticoats and pale, dissolute faces shocked even Sylvia’s masculine tolerance; there was something positively evil in their commonplace attire and abandoned motion; they were like anemic shop-girls possessed with unclean spirits.

“I believe we shall make these folks mad,” said Morera, with a happy chuckle. Before Sylvia could refuse he had taken her in his arms and was dancing round the room at double time. The cracked mirrors caught their reflections as they swept round, and Sylvia realized with a shock the amount of diamonds they were wearing between them and the effect they must be having in this thieves’ kitchen.

“Some of these guys are looking mad already,” Morera proclaimed, enthusiastically.

The dance came to an end, and they leaned back against the wall exhausted. Several men walked provocatively past, looking Sylvia and her partner slowly up and down.

“Come along of me,” Morera said. “We’ll promenade right around the hall.”

He put her arm in his and swaggered up and down. The other dancers were gathering in knots and eyeing them menacingly. At last an enormous American slouched across the empty floor and stood in their path.

“Say, who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked.

“Say, what the hell’s dat to you?” demanded Morera.

“Quit!” bellowed the American.

Morera fired without taking his hand from his pocket, and the American dropped.

“Hands up! Manos arriba!” cried Morera, pulling out his two pistols and covering the dancers while he backed with Sylvia toward the entrance. When they were up-stairs in the vestibule he told her to look if the carriage were at the door; when he heard that it was not he gave a loud whoop of exultation.

“I said I believed we was going to have lots of fun. We got to run now and see if any of those guys can catch us.”

He seized Sylvia’s arm, and they darted down the steps and out into the street. Morera looked rapidly right and left along the narrow thoroughfare. They could hear the noise of angry voices gathering in the vestibule of the saloon.

“This way and round the turning,” he cried, pulling Sylvia to the left. There was only one window alight in the narrow alley up which they had turned, a dim orange stain in the darkness. Morera hammered on the door as their pursuers came running round the corner. Two or three shots were fired, but before they were within easy range the door had opened and they were inside. The old hag who had opened it protested when she saw Sylvia, but Morera commanded her in Spanish to bolt it, and she seemed afraid to disobey. Somewhere in a distant part of the house there was a sound of women’s crooning; outside they could hear the shuffling of their pursuers’ feet.

“Say, this is fun,” Morera chuckled. “We’ve arrived into a burdel.”

It was impossible for Sylvia to be angry with him, so frank was he in his enjoyment of the situation. The old woman, however, was very angry indeed, for the pursuers were banging upon her door and she feared a visit from the police. Her clamor was silenced with a handful of notes.

“Champagne for the girls,” Morera cried.

For Sylvia the evening had already taken on the nature of a dream, and she accepted the immediate experience as only one of an inconsequent procession of events. Having attained this state of mind, she saw nothing unusual in sitting down with half a dozen women who clung to their sofas as sea-anemones to the rocks of an aquarium. She had a fleeting astonishment that they should have names, that beings so utterly indistinguishable should be called Juanilla or Belita or Tula or Lola or Maruca, but the faint shock of realizing a common humanity passed off almost at once, and she found herself enjoying a conversation with Belita, who spoke a few words of broken French. With the circulation of the champagne the women achieved a kind of liveliness and examined Sylvia’s jewels with murmurs of admiration. The ancient bawd who owned them proposed a dance, to which Morera loudly agreed. The women whispered and giggled among themselves, looking bashfully over their shoulders at Sylvia in a way that made the crone thump her stick on the floor with rage. She explained in Spanish the cause of their hesitation.

“They don’t want to take off their clothes in front of you,” Morera translated to Sylvia, with apologies for such modesty from women who no longer had the right to possess even their own emotions; nevertheless, he suggested that they might be excused to avoid spoiling a jolly evening.

“Good heavens! I should think so!” Sylvia agreed.

Morera gave a magnanimous wave of his arm, in which he seemed to confer upon the women the right to keep on their clothes. They clapped their hands and laughed like children. Soon to the sound of castanets they wriggled their bodies in a way that was not so much suggestive of dancing as of flea-bites. A lamp with a tin reflector jarred fretfully upon a shelf, and the floor creaked.

Suddenly Morera held up his hand for silence. The knocking on the street door was getting louder. He asked the old woman if there was any way of getting out at the back.

“Dat’s all right, kid,” he told Sylvia. “We can crawl over the dooryards at the back. Dat door in front ain’t going to hold not more than five minutes.”

He tore the elastic from a bundle of notes and scattered them in the air like leaves; the women pounced upon the largesse and were fighting with one another on the floor when Sylvia and Morera followed the old woman to the back door and out into a squalid yard.

How they ever surmounted the various walls and crossed the various yards they encountered Sylvia could never understand. All she remembered was being lifted on packing-cases and dust-bins, of slipping once and crashing into a hen-coop, of tearing her dress on some broken glass, of riding astride walls and pricking her face against plants, and of repeating to herself all the time, “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed.” When at last they extricated themselves from the maze of dooryards they wandered for a long time through a maze of narrow streets. Sylvia had managed to stuff all her jewelry out of sight into her corsage, where it scratched her most uncomfortably, but any discomfort was preferable to the covetous eyes of the half-breeds that watched her from the shadows.

“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 bum 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 passed 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 bummed 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 Marseilles 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 assured 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 Marseilles, Sylvia conceived a longing to meet Valentine again, and she telegraphed to ElÈne at Brussels for her address. It was with a quite exceptional anticipation 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 passion 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 nobly independent.

Like other childish memories, Sylvia found Valentine much less impressive when she met her again—much less impressive, for instance, than ElÈne, 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 Marseilles, just as, when one takes up a long-interrupted correspondence, great attention is often devoted to the weather at the moment.

“Alors, vous Êtes 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 Êtes trÈs-bien ici,” said Sylvia, looking round. The train had emerged and was running through a dull cutting.

“Oui, je suis trÈs-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 assurance.

“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 trÈs-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.”

Passion 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 passive 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-glass. When the water is very hot, Ça fait drÔle, 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 assented, 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 Marseilles?”

“Oui, je pars ce soir.”

She had not really intended to leave Marseilles 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 À 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 passion 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 passion 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 passion 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 passion, 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 damned 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 accumulating 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 ass,” she said. “And since the Argentine really a golden ass; 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-glass 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 rÉclame and appear at the Folies BergÈres.

“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-Être quelqu’un m’a plaquÉ.”

He tried to look grave and sympathetic.

“Salaud,” she mocked. “Crois-tu que je t’en dirais. Bigre! je creverais plutÔt.”

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

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

He assured 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 fluster 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 brass. ‘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 assisted 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?”

“Spain.”

“Are you going chasing after Lily again?”

“No, we’re going off on our own.”

“Well, I may have started on the gad late in life, but I’ve certainly started now,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Spain? That’s where the Spanish flies come from, isn’t it? Well, they ought to be lively enough, so I suppose we shall enjoy ourselves. And how do we get there?”

“By train!”

“Dear land! it’s wonderful what they can do nowadays. What relation then is Spain to Portugal exactly? You must excuse my ignorance, Sylvia, but really I’m still all of a fluster. Fancy being bounced out of me bed into Spain. You really are a demon. Fancy you getting yellow fever. You haven’t changed color much. Spain! Upon my word I never heard anything like it. We’d better take plenty with us to eat. I knew it reminded me of something. The Spanish Armada! I once heard a clergyman recite the Spanish Armada, though what it was all about I’ve completely forgotten. There was some fighting in it though. I went with the captain. Well, if he could see me now. You may be sure he’s laughing, wherever he is. The idea of me going to Spain.”

The idea materialized; that night they drove to the Gare d’OrlÉans.