“Then you will stay till to-morrow?”

“Why, yes.  You know that that was the agreement.”

“All right, my dear, I just wanted to know.  Wait for me here a minute, I will be right back.”

And she left me in the darkness.  I heard her shutting two doors and then I thought I heard her talking.  I was surprised and uneasy.  The thought that she had a protector staggered me.  But I have good fists and a solid back.  “We shall see,” I said to myself.

I listened attentively with ear and mind.  Some one was stirring about, walking quietly and very carefully.  Then another door was opened and I thought I again heard some one talking, but in a very low tone.

She came back carrying a lighted candle.

“You may come in,” she said.

She said “thou” in speaking to me, which was an indication of possession.  I went in and after passing through a dining room in which it was very evident that no one ever ate, I entered a typical room of all these women, a furnished room with red curtains and a soiled eiderdown bed covering.

“Make yourself at home, ’mon chat’,” she said.

I gave a suspicious glance at the room, but there seemed no reason for uneasiness.

As she took off her wraps she began to laugh.

“Well, what ails you?  Are you changed into a pillar of salt?  Come, hurry up.”

I did as she suggested.

Five minutes later I longed to put on my things and get away.  But this terrible languor that had overcome me at home took possession of me again, and deprived me of energy enough to move and I stayed in spite of the disgust that I felt for this association.  The unusual attractiveness that I supposed I had discovered in this creature over there under the chandeliers of the theater had altogether vanished on closer acquaintance, and she was nothing more to me now than a common woman, like all the others, whose indifferent and complaisant kiss smacked of garlic.

I thought I would say something.

“Have you lived here long?” I asked.

“Over six months on the fifteenth of January.”

“Where were you before that?”

“In the Rue Clauzel.  But the janitor made me very uncomfortable and I left.”

And she began to tell me an interminable story of a janitor who had talked scandal about her.

But, suddenly, I heard something moving quite close to us.  First there was a sigh, then a slight, but distinct, sound as if some one had turned round on a chair.

I sat up abruptly and asked.

“What was that noise?”

She answered quietly and confidently: 

“Do not be uneasy, my dear boy, it is my neighbor.  The partition is so thin that one can hear everything as if it were in the room.  These are wretched rooms, just like pasteboard.”

I felt so lazy that I paid no further attention to it.  We resumed our conversation.  Driven by the stupid curiosity that prompts all men to question these creatures about their first experiences, to attempt to lift the veil of their first folly, as though to find in them a trace of pristine innocence, to love them, possibly, in a fleeting memory of their candor and modesty of former days, evoked by a word, I insistently asked her about her earlier lovers.