him not to invite her any more. She resented his perfectly hidden
resentment.

What disturbed her more than anything else was a notion in her mind,
possibly a wrong notion, that she cared for him less madly than of
old. She had always said to herself, and more than once sadly to him,
that his fancy for her would not and could not last; but that hers
for him should decline puzzled her and added to her grievances against
him. She looked at him from the little nest made by her head between
two pillows. Did she in truth care for him less madly than of old? She
wondered. She had only one gauge, the physical.

She began to talk despairingly about Marthe, whom, of course, she had
had to mention at the door. He said quietly:

"But it's not because of Marthe's caprices that I'm asked to come down
to-night, I suppose?"

She told him about the closing of the Promenade in a tone of absolute,
resigned certainty that admitted of no facile pooh-poohings or
reassurances. And then, glancing sidelong at the night-table, where
the lamp burned, she extended her half-bared arm and picked up the
landlord's notice and gave it to him to read. Watching him read it
she inwardly trembled, as though she had started on some perilous
enterprise the end of which might be black desperation, as though she
had cast off from the shore and was afloat amid the waves of a vast,
swollen river--waves that often hid the distant further bank. She felt
somehow that she was playing for all or nothing. And though she had
had immense experience of men, though it was her special business
to handle men, she felt herself to be unskilled and incompetent. The