re was at last asleep in his arms he
discovered that he was madly, was passionately, was overwhelmingly in
love with her. It was a passion that had arisen like fire in dry corn.
He could think of nothing else; he could live for nothing else. But La
Dolciquita was a reasonable creature without an ounce of passion in
her. She wanted a certain satisfaction of her appetites and Edward had
appealed to her the night before. Now that was done with, and, quite
coldly, she said that she wanted money if he was to have any more of
her. It was a perfectly reasonable commercial transaction. She did not
care two buttons for Edward or for any man and he was asking her to
risk a very good situation with the Grand Duke. If Edward could put up
sufficient money to serve as a kind of insurance against accident she
was ready to like Edward for a time that would be covered, as it were,
by the policy. She was getting fifty thousand dollars a year from her
Grand Duke; Edward would have to pay a premium of two years' hire for a
month of her society. There would not be much risk of the Grand Duke's
finding it out and it was not certain that he would give her the keys of
the street if he did find out. But there was the risk--a twenty per cent
risk, as she figured it out. She talked to Edward as if she had been a
solicitor with an estate to sell--perfectly quietly and perfectly coldly
without any inflections in her voice. She did not want to be unkind
to him; but she could see no reason for being kind to him. She was a
virtuous business woman with a mother and two sisters and her own old
age to be provided comfortably for. She did not expect more than a five
years' further run. She was twenty-four and, as she said: "We Spanish
women are horrors at thirty." Edward swore that he would provide for her
for life if she would come to him and leave off talking so horribly; but
she only shrugged one shoulder slowly and contemptuously. He tried
to convince this woman, who, as he saw it, had surrendered to him her
virtue, that he regarded it as in any case his duty to provide for her,
and to cherish her and even to love her--for life. In return for her
sacrifice he would do that. In return, again, for his honourable love
she would listen for ever to the accounts of his estate. That was how he
figured it out.

She shrugged the same shoulder with the same gesture and held out her
left hand with the elbow at her side:

"Enfin, mon ami," she said, "put in this