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Thank God, for her sake, that I was legally married to poor little Lola, she has at least no stain on her birth with which to reproach me. The officious individual who is personally conducting me to the Valley of the Shadow warns me that I must be brief I kept the child with me as long as I could, people were wonderfully kind, but it was no life for her.
She watched the Vigils playing, the kids gamboling, the magpies squabbling; but never a lighter look stirred the chill calm of her little, russet-toned features, or the sombre depths of her dark, long eyes. Jane watched her in despair. "I'm afraid you aint very well contented, Lola," she said, one day. "Is there anything any one can do?" Lola was sitting in the August sunshine.
"I had no idea that you were going south!" laughed Rayne happily as Lola, warmly dressed in furs, stood on deck chatting with Mrs. Blumenfeld and watching the boat casting off from the quay. "It will be most delightful to travel together," he went on. "Lola stays in Paris and we go on to the Riviera. I suppose you've got your sleeping berths from Paris to-night?"
They spent the afternoon on the one thing Lola coming on, singing her gay song, her halt at sight of Santuzza and Turiddu, her look at Santuzza, at Turiddu, her greeting for each. They tried it twenty different ways. They discussed what would have been in the minds of all three. They built up "business" for Lola, and for the two others to increase the significance of Lola's actions.
Jane had faltered in the trust which she had assumed, and now, confronted with the embarrassment of facing Lola's father in a plain confession of her delinquency, she hesitated and was miserable and afraid and reluctant. Rather than state her situation she would even keep Lola from school. "It isn't that I care for that!" throbbed Lola.
Then Vauvenarde, with a ghastly face, reeled sideways and collapsed in a heap on the ground. Of what happened immediately afterwards I have but a confused memory. I remember that Lola and I both fell on our knees beside the stabbed man, and I remember his horrible staring eyes and open mouth. I remember that, though she was white and shaky, she neither shrieked, went into hysterics, nor fainted.
To counteract this move Lola enrolled a students' corps of her own a small army of young stalwarts, whose cry was "Lola and Liberty," and who were sworn to fight her battles, if need be, to the death. Thus was the fire of revolution kindled by a woman's vanity and lust of power.
With four left over from previous earnings, she had eleven. Five of this went to pay the regular installment on the clothes she had to buy. The next week she was even in greater feather. Now, only three dollars need be paid for room rent and five on her clothes. The rest she had for food and her own whims. "You'd better save a little for summer," cautioned Lola. "We'll probably close in May."
He showed off the ferocious beast's quality by making it dash itself against the wires, arch its huge back, and shoot out venomous claws. Lola commanded him by sign to open the cage. He approached in simulated terror, Hephaestus uttering blood-curdling howls, and every time he touched the handle of the door Hephaestus sprang at him like a tiger with the tomcat's hateful hiss.
I did not feel within me the wide charity of Lola Brandt; and I could not repress a smile, as I ate my solitary meal, at the perils of the adventure to which I was invited. I had no doubt that it bore the same relation to danger as Monsieur Saupiquet's sevenpence-halfpenny bore to a serious debt.
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