“Ay, money!...  In no social plane was its power so evident as that in which she was accustomed to dwell.  In the Palace Hotels she had met women of soldierly aspect and common hands, smoking at all hours, with their feet up and the white triangle of their petticoats stretched over the seat.  They were like the prostitutes waiting at the doors of their huts.  How were they ever permitted to live there!...  Nevertheless, the men bowed before them like slaves, or followed as suppliants these creatures who talked with unction of the millions inherited from their fathers, of their formidable wealth of industrial origin which had enabled them to buy noble husbands and then give themselves up to their natural tastes as fast, coarse women.

“I never had any luck....  I am too haughty for that kind of thing.  Men find me ill-humored, argumentative, and nervous.  Perhaps I was born to be the mother of a family....  Who knows but what I might have been otherwise if I had lived in your country?”

Her announcement of her religious veneration for money took on an accent of hate.  Poor and well-educated girls, if afraid of the misery of poverty, had no other recourse than prostitution.  They lacked a dowry,—­that indispensable requisite in many civilized families for honorable marriage and home-making.

Accursed poverty!...  It had weighed upon her life like a fatality.  The men who had appeared good at first afterwards became poisoned, turning into egoists and wretches.  Doctor Talberg, on returning from America, had abandoned her in order to marry a young and rich woman, the daughter of a trader, a senator from Hamburg.  Others had equally exploited her youth, taking their share of her gayety and beauty only to marry, later, women who had merely the attractiveness of a great fortune.

She had finally come to hate them all, desiring their extermination, exasperated at the very thought that she needed them to live and could never free herself from this slavery.  Trying to be independent, she had taken up the stage.

“I have danced.  I have sung; but my successes were always because I was a woman.  Men followed after me, desiring the female, and ridiculing the actress.  Besides—­the life behind the scenes!...  A white-slave market with a name on the play-bills....  What exploitation!...”

The desire of freeing herself from all this had led her to make friends with the doctor, accepting her propositions.  It seemed to her more honorable to serve a great nation, to be a secret functionary, laboring in the shadow for its grandeur.  Besides, at the beginning she was fascinated by the novelty of the work, the adventures on risky missions, the proud consideration that with her espionage she was weaving the web of the future, preparing the history of time to come.