She had failed in her subtleties, and there had followed scenes of bitter strife between the two.  Sylvia, the cunning huntress, having pretended to relent, van Tuiver had gone South to his wooing again, while Claire had stayed at home and read a book about the poisoners of the Italian renaissance.  And then had come the announcement of the engagement, after which the royal conqueror had come back in a panic, and sent embassies of his male friends to plead with Claire, alternately promising her wealth and threatening her with destitution, appealing to her fear, her cupidity, and even to her love.  To all of which I listened, thinking of the wide-open, innocent eyes of the picture, and shedding tears within my soul.  So must the gods feel as they look down upon the affairs of mortals, seeing how they destroy themselves by ignorance and folly, seeing how they walk into the future as a blind man into a yawning abyss.

I gave, of course, due weight to the sneers of Claire.  Perhaps the innocent one really had set a trap—­had picked van Tuiver out and married him for his money.  But even so, I could hope that she had not known what she was doing.  Surely it had never occurred to her that through all the days of her triumph she would have to eat and 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.