get rid of the old woman," he whispered to her hurriedly,
with panting ferocity. "Hang her! I've never cared for her. The climate
don't suit her; I shall tell her to go to her people in Europe. She will
have to go, too! I will see to it. Eins, zwei, march! And then we shall
sell this hotel and start another somewhere else."

He assured her that he didn't care what he did for her sake; and it
was true. Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in
defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister
valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill. Her shrinking form, her
downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered at the end of an
empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to the overpowering
force of his will, the recognition of his personal fascinations. For
every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and
the human race come to an end.

It's easy to imagine Schomberg's humiliation, his shocked fury, when
he discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his attacks, his
prayers, and his fiercest protestations, had been snatched from under
his nose by "that Swede," apparently without any trouble worth speaking
of. He refused to believe the fact. He would have it, at first, that
the Zangiacomos, for some unfathomable reason, had played him a scurvy
trick, but when no further doubt was possible, he changed his view of
Heyst. The despised Swede became for Schomberg the deepest, the most
dangerous, the most hateful of scoundrels. He could not believe that the
creature he had coveted with so much force and with so little effect,
was in reality tender, docile to her impulse, and had almost offered
herself to Heyst without a sense of guilt, in a desire of safety, and
from a profound need of placing her trust where her woman's instinct
guided her ignorance. Nothing would serve Schomberg but that she must
have been circumvented by some occult exercise of force or craft, by the
laying of some subtle trap. His wounded vanity wondered ceaselessly at
the means "that Swede" had employed to seduce her away from a man
like him--Schomberg--as though those means were bound to have been
extraordinary, unheard of, inconceivable. He slapped his forehead openly
before his customers; he would sit brooding in silence or else would
burst out unexpectedly declaiming against Heyst without measure,
discretion, or prudence, with swollen features and an affectation of
outr