s a girl. Her
detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled or even
surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to which a
man's intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and
wide-eyed she went from table to table with the air of a sleep-walker
and with no other sound but the slight rattle of the coins to attract
attention. It was long after the sea-chapter of my life had been closed
but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half a
life-time, and it was in something of the jack-ashore spirit that I
dropped a five-franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the
sleep-walker turned her head to gaze at me and said "Merci, Monsieur,"
in a tone in which there was no gratitude but only surprise. I must have
been idle indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence
that the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed their
seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that
particular performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard who
conducted, and who might for all I know have been her father, but whose
real mission in life was to be a model for the Zangiacomo of "Victory."
Having got a clear line of sight I naturally (being idle) continued to
look at the girl through all the second part of the programme. The shape
of her dark head inclined over the violin was fascinating, and, while
resting between the pieces of that interminable programme she was, in
her white dress and with her brown hands reposing in her lap, the very
image of dreamy innocence. The mature, bad-tempered woman at the piano
might have been her mother, though there was not the slightest
resemblance between them. All I am certain of in their personal relation
to each other is that cruel pinch on the upper part of the arm. That I
am sure I have seen! There could be no mistake. I was in a too idle mood
to imagine such a gratuitous barbarity. It may have been playfulness,
yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp. It may have
been playfulness. Yet I saw plainly poor "dreamy innocence" rub gently
the affected place as she filed off with the other performers down the
middle aisle between the marble tables in the uproar of voices, the
rattling of dominoes, through a blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke. I
believe that those people left the town next day.

Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the other
side of the Place de