“What do you look so astonished at? It is easy to see you do not know much of him. All his friends are just like him; if you listen to them for half an hour at a stretch, you get regularly sick. When I think of the terrible evenings that I have spent in their company, I feel ready to die with yawning;” and as she spoke, she suited the action to the word. “Ah! if he really loved me!” added she.
Zora made a little gesture of contempt which Toto Chupin might have envied.
“Do you think so?” said she. “Do you know what it is he loves in me? When people pass me they cry out, ‘Isn’t she good style?’ and then the idiot is as pleased as Punch; but if I had on a cotton gown, he would think nothing of me.”
Rose had evidently learned a good ideal, as her beauty had never been so radiant. She was one glow of health and strength.
“Then my name was not good enough for him,” she went on. “His aristocratic lips could not bring themselves to utter such a common name as Rose, so he christened me Zora, a regular puppy dog’s name. He has plenty of money, but money is not everything after all. Paul had no money, and yet I loved him a thousand times better. On my word, I have almost forgotten how to laugh, and yet I used to be as merry as the day was long.”
“Well, you see, I wanted to experience what a woman feels when she has a Cashmere shawl on, so one fine morning I took wing. But there, who knows? Paul would very likely have left me one day. There was some one who was doing his best to separate us, an old blackguard called Tantaine, who lived in the same house.”
“Ah!” answered he cautiously. “What interest could he have had in separating you?”
“I don’t know,” answered the girl, assuming a serious air; “but I am sure he was trying it on. A fellow doesn’t hand over banknotes for nothing, and I saw him give one for five hundred francs to Paul; and more than that, he promised him that he should make a great fortune through a friend of his called Mascarin.”
Andre started. He remembered the visit that Paul had made him, on the pretext of restoring the twenty francs he had borrowed, and at which he had boasted that he had an income of a thousand francs a month, and might make more, though he had not said how this was to be done. “I think that Paul has forgotten me. I saw him once at Van Klopen’s, and he never attempted to say a word to me. He was certainly with that Mascarin at the time.”