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Updated: June 14, 2025
The Foreign Secretary was advising Ivor to wire the Élysèe Palace for rooms without any delay, as there must be no hitch about his meeting Maxine, once it was arranged for her to go there. "Any misunderstanding would be fatal," he went on, as solemnly as if the safety of Maxine's head depended upon Ivor's trip.
I must trust to luck trust to luck," I said to myself, desperately, as Marianne dressed me. "By and by I'll think it all out." But after that my part gave me no more time to think. I was not Maxine de Renzie, but Princess Hélène of Hungaria, whose tragic fate was even more sure and swift than miserable Maxine's.
Once, when the gendarmes were peering under the sofa, or behind the sofa cushions, a grey shadow round Maxine's eyes made her beautiful face look like a death-mask in the white electric light, which did not fail now, or spare her any cruelty of revelation. She was smiling contemptuously still always the same smile but her forehead appeared to have been sprinkled with diamond dust.
Like the gleam from the lamp that lives in an opal, this mind-brightness of Maxine's pierced the clouds of her beauty capriciously, now half-veiled, now shining forth. It was the light of that flame which men call originality. Maxine saw the world by the light of her own lamp. Adams, though he had seen far more of the world than she, had seen it by the light of other people's lamps.
Bluffly, and with little grace enough, but with earnestness and a cunning one would never have suspected, he told of Maxine's great admiration for the author's work, and how she had suggested the enlistment of the said author in the crusade against crime which he, Adams, was endeavouring to raise.
She said nothing, she did not meet his eyes, but her cold fingers clasped his convulsively, and two tears fell hot upon their hands. That was all; that was the sum of their expression. No other word was spoken. They sat silent, watching the cigarette burn itself out between Maxine's fingers. She held it to the very last, then dropped it into her finger-bowl and rose. "Now, mon cher!"
The word "treaty" was new to me in this connection, for the Foreign Secretary had not thought it necessary that his messenger should be wholly in his secrets and Maxine's. Yet hearing the word brought no great surprise. I knew that I had been cat's-paw in some game of high stakes.
Now you are going to give with both hands I am to have my friend and my love as well. It is very wonderful. Oh, sweet, don't fret! Don't fret! See how simple it all is!" But Maxine's bitter crying went on, until at last it frightened him. "Maxine, don't! Don't, for God's sake! Why should you cry like this? What is it, when all's said and done, but a point of view?
The young Italian lighted cigarette after cigarette, smoking furiously and beating soundless time upon the floor with his foot, the old Pole sat lost in an emotional dream, tears gathering slowly in his eyes and trickling unheeded down his cheeks, while Lize, in her moveless isolation, gazed with fixed intensity at the wall above Maxine's head.
"Her mouth is too wide," said the women, who, knowing nothing of the philosophy of art, hit upon the defect that was Maxine's main charm. Berselius introduced Adams to his wife and daughter, and scarcely had he done so than a servant, in the blue-and-gold livery of the house, flung open the door and announced that déjeuner was served.
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