Meanwhile the little girl used to play in the hotel garden of the Palace Hotel with other children dressed up and adorned like luxurious and fragile dolls, each one worth many millions.

“From my childhood,” continued Freya, “I had been a companion of women who are now celebrated for their riches in New York, Paris, and in London.  I have been on familiar terms with great heiresses that are to-day, through their marriages, duchesses and even princesses of the blood royal.  Many of them have since passed by me, without recognizing me, and I have said nothing, knowing that the equality of childhood is no more than a vague recollection....”

Thus she had grown into womanhood.  A few of her father’s casual bargains had permitted them to continue this existence of brilliant and expensive poverty.  The promoter had considered such environment indispensable for his future negotiations.  Life in the most expensive hotels, an automobile by the month, gowns designed by the greatest modistes for his wife and daughter, summers at the most fashionable resorts, winter-skating in Switzerland,—­all these luxuries were for him but a kind of uniform of respectability that kept him in the world of the powerful, permitting him to enter everywhere.

“This existence molded me forever, and has influenced the rest of my life.  Dishonor, death, anything is to me preferable to poverty....  I, who have no fear of danger, become a coward at the mere thought of that!”

The mother died, credulous and sensuous, worn out with expecting a solid fortune that never arrived.  The daughter continued with her father, becoming the type of young woman who lives among men from hotel to hotel, always somewhat masculine in her attitude;—­a half-way virgin who knows everything, is not frightened at anything, guards ferociously the integrity of her sex, calculating just what it may be worth, and adoring wealth as the most powerful divinity on earth.

Finding herself upon her father’s death with no other fortune than her gowns and a few artistic gems of scant value, she had coldly decided upon her destiny.

“In our world there is no other virtue than that of money.  The girls of the people surrender themselves less easily than a young woman accustomed to luxury having as her only fortune some knowledge of the piano, of dancing, and a few languages....  We yield our body as though fulfilling a material function, without shame and without regret.  It is a simple matter of business.  The only thing that matters is to preserve the former life with all its conveniences ... not to come down.”

She passed hastily over her recollection of this period of her existence.  An old acquaintance of her father, an old trader of Vienna, had been the first.  Then she felt romantic flutterings which even the coldest and most positive women do not escape.  She believed that she had fallen in love with a Dutch officer, a blonde Apollo who used to skate with her in Saint Moritz.  This had been her only husband.  Finally she had become bored with the colonial drowsiness of Batavia and had returned to Europe, breaking off her marriage in order to renew her life in the great hotels, passing the winter season at the most luxurious resorts.