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She was ravished by the quality and range of the music it gave forth. Madame de Vallorbes pressed her hands together within the warm comfort of her sable muff, averted her face again, lest it should betray the eager excitement that gained on her, and continued: "Yes, whip and rein and bit are hardly pretty in that connection, are they?
Madame de Vallorbes, resplendent in crocus-yellow brocade, costly lace, and seed pearls, the young man, her companion the young man of the light, forked beard, domed skull, vain eyes and peevish mouth the young man of holy and dissolute aspect were good enough instruments for the Eternal Justice to employ in respect of him, Richard Calmady.
As Richard spoke he turned, leaning his back against the balustrade, his face away from the sunlight and the wide view. Again the extent of his deformity became arrestingly apparent to Madame de Vallorbes. "Has this woman ever been here?" she asked. "Yes she has been here." "And then? And then?" Helen cried.
She ran over the scene in her mind now, as she stood among the pocketing pea-fowl, and it caused her both mirth and delightful little heats, in which the heart has a word to say. Madame de Vallorbes was ravished to feel her heart, just now and again. For, contradictory as it may seem, no game is perfect that has not moments of seriousness.
Of course. How should it be otherwise? It gave me great pleasure to look at that which looked like her. It gives me pleasure even yet. So I wrote and asked de Vallorbes to be kind enough to let me rent the villa. You remember it was not particularly well cared for. There was an air of fallen greatness about the poor place. Inside it was something of a barrack." "I remember," Helen said.
And whoever liked this particular newcomer, Madame de Vallorbes, he was sorry to say and on more than one occasion he said it with quite inconvenient distinctness he did not. That same morning Richard was up and out early. Fog had followed on the evening's rain, and at sunrise still shrouded all the landscape.
Helen hugged the idea with almost childish satisfaction. Now she could go back to the Villa Vallorbes in peace, and take what measure She left the sentence unfinished. Even in thought it is often an error to define. Let the future and her intentions regarding it remain in the vague!
She really held her friend in very warm affection. But Madame de Vallorbes never confused secondary and primary issues. When you have a really big deal on hand and of the bigness of her present deal the last quarter of an hour had brought her notably increased assurance even the dearest friend must stand clear and get very decidedly out of the way.
And without waiting for any reply to this cryptic utterance, she stepped swiftly round behind the carriage again, waved her hand from the door-step and then swung away, with lazy, long-limbed grace, past the waiting men-servants and through to the ruddy brightness of the hall. Madame de Vallorbes settled herself back rather languidly in her place.
For a little space she rested in all this, savouring the sweetness of it as some odour of costly sacrifice. For whatever her sins and lapses, Helen de Vallorbes had the fine æsthetic appreciations, as well as the inevitable animality, of the great courtesan. The artist was at least as present in her as the whore.
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