"You may sit there and smoke, and look out upon your wonderful Paris,"
Anna said lightly. "You may talk--if you can talk cheerfully, not
unless."
"And you?" asked David Courtlaw.
"Well, if I find your conversation interesting I shall listen. If not,
I have plenty to think about," she answered, leaning back in her
chair, and watching the smoke from her own cigarette curl upwards.
"For instance?"
She smiled.
"How I am to earn enough _sous_ for my dinner to-morrow--or failing
that, what I can sell."
His face darkened.
"And yet," he said, "you bid me talk cheerfully, or not at all."
"Why not? Your spirits at least should be good. It is not you who runs
the risk of going dinnerless to-morrow."
He turned upon her almost fiercely.
"You know," he muttered, "you know quite well that your troubles are
far more likely to weigh upon me than my own. Do you think that I am
utterly selfish?"
She raised her eyebrows.
"Troubles, my friend," she exclaimed lightly. "But I have no
troubles."
He stared at her incredulously, and she laughed very softly.
"What a gloomy person you are!" she murmured. "You call yourself an
artist--but you have no temperament. The material cares of life hang
about your neck like a millstone. A doubt as to your dinner to-morrow
would make you miserable to-night. You know I call that positively
wicked. It is not at all what I expected either. On the whole, I think
that I have been disappointed with the life here. There is so little
_abandon_, so little real joyousness."
"And yet," he murmured, "one of the greatest of our writers has
declared that the true spirit of Bohemianism is denied to your sex."
"He was probably right," she declared. "Bohemianism is the least
understood word ever coined. I do not think that I have the Bohemian
spirit at all."
He looked at her thoughtfully. She wore a plain black dress, reaching
almost to her throat--her small oval face, with the large brown eyes,
was colourless, delicately expressive, yet with something mysterious
in its Sphinx-like immobility. A woman hard to read, who seemed to
delight in keeping locked up behind that fascinating rigidity of
feature the intense sensibility which had been revealed to him, her
master, only in occasional and rare moments of enthusiasm. She
reminded him sometimes of the one holy and ineffable Madonna, at
others of Berode, the great courtezan of her day, who had sent kings
away from her doors, and had just announced her intention of ending
her life in a convent.
"I believe that you are right," he said softly. "It is the worst of
including in our vocabulary words which have no definite meaning,
perhaps I should say of which the meaning varies according to one's
personal point of view. You, for instance, you live, you are not
afraid to live. Yet you make our Bohemianism seem like a vulgar
thing."