"I'm perfectly free to speak of your mother." The first time she had added: "Mine is just as good as yours." But she had realized that the remark was vulgar, and she had not repeated it.
The dining-room was now empty. She looked at her watch, and saw that it was three o'clock.
"I must be off," she said. "_La Grille_ is being rehearsed this afternoon. Constantin Marc ought to be at the theatre already. There's another queer fellow for you! He boasts that when he's in the Vivarais he ruins all the women. And yet he is so shy that he daren't even talk to Fagette and Falempin. I frighten him. It amuses me."
She was so tired that she had not the courage to rise.
"Isn't it queer? They are saying everywhere that I'm engaged for the Français, it's not true. There's not even a question of it. Of course, I can't remain indefinitely where I am. In the long run one would get besotted there. But there is no hurry. I have a great part to create in _La Grille_. We shall see after that. What I want is to play comedy. I don't want to join the Français and then to do nothing."
Suddenly, gazing in front of her with eyes full of terror, she flung herself backwards, turned pale, and uttered a shrill scream. Then her eyelids fluttered, and she murmured that she could not breathe.
Robert loosened her jacket, and moistened her temples with a little water.
"A priest! I saw a priest. He was in his surplice. His lips were moving, but no sound came from them. He looked at me."
"Come now, my darling, how can you suppose that a priest, a priest in his surplice, would show himself in a restaurant?"
She listened obediently, and allowed herself to be persuaded.
"You are right, you are right, I know it well enough."
In that little head of hers illusions were soon dispelled. She was born two hundred and thirty years after the death of Descartes, of whom she had never heard; yet, as Dr. Socrates would have said, he had taught her the use of reason.
Robert met her at six o'clock after the rehearsal, under the arcades of the Odéon, and drove away with her in a cab.
"You would not care to go back to our house out there?"
He replied that he had thought as much; that he would try to find something else: a little ground-floor flat in Paris; that in the meantime, just for to-day, they would content themselves with a chance abode.