sleep with the shade of another woman at her side!

Claire said to me, not once, but a dozen times, "He'll come back to
me. She'll never be able to make him happy." And so I pictured
Sylvia upon her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose
voice she would never hear, whose name she would never know. All
that van Tuiver had learned from Claire, the sensuality, the
_ennin_, the contempt for woman--it would rise to torment and
terrify his bride, and turn her life to bitterness. And then beyond
this, deeps upon deeps, to which my imagination did not go--and of
which the Frenchwoman, with all her freedom of tongue, gave me no
more than a hint which I could not comprehend.

5. Claire Lepage at this time was desperately lonely and unhappy.
Having made the discovery that my arms were sturdy, used to doing a
man's work, she clung to them. She begged me to go home with her, to
visit her--finally to come and live with her. Until recently an
elderly companion, had posed as her aunt, and kept her respectable
while she was upon van Tuiver's yacht, and at his castle in
Scotland. But this companion had died, and now Claire had no one
with whom to discuss her soul-states.

She occupied a beautiful house on the West Side, not far from
Riverside Drive; and in addition to the use of this she had an
income of eight thousand a year--which was not enough to make
possible a chauffeur, nor even to dress decently, but only enough to
keep in debt upon. Such as the income was, however, she was willing
to share it with me. So there opened before me a new profession--
and a new insight into the complications of parasitism.