e could savour a
fashionable restaurant as well as any harum-scarum minx there. Her
secret fear was still obesity. She was capable of imagining herself
at fat as Marthe--and ruined; for, though a few peculiar amateurs
appreciated solidity, the great majority of men did not. However, she
was not getting stouter.

She had a secret sincere respect for certain of her own qualities; and
if women of the world condemned certain other qualities in her, well,
she despised women of the world--selfish idlers who did nothing, who
contributed nothing, to the sum of life, whereas she was a useful and
indispensable member of society, despite her admitted indolence. In
this summary way she comforted herself in her loss of caste.

Without Gilbert, of course, her existence would have been fatally
dull, and she might have been driven to terrible remedies against
ennui and emptiness. The depth and violence of her feeling for Gilbert
were indescribable--at any rate by her. She turned again from the
darkening window to the sofa and sat down and tried to recall the
figures of the dozens of men who had sat there, and she could recall
at most six or eight, and Gilbert alone was real. What a paragon!...
Her scorn for girls who succumbed to _souteneurs_ was measureless; as
a fact she had met few who did.... She would have liked to beautify
her flat for Gilbert, but in the first place she did not wish to spend
money on it, in the second place she was too indolent to buckle to the
enterprise, and in the third place if she beautified it she would be
doing so not for Gilbert, but for the monotonous procession of her
clients. Her flat was a public resort, and so she would do nothing to
it. Besides, she did not care a fig about the look of furniture; the
feel of furniture alone interested her; she wanted softness and warmth
and no more.

She moved across to the piano, remembering that she had not practised
that day, and that she had promised Gilbert to practise every day.
He was teaching her. At the beginning she had dreamt of acquiring
brilliance such as his on the piano, but she had soon seen the
futility of the dream and had moderated her hopes accordingly. Even
with terrific efforts she could not make her hands do the things
that his did quite easily at the first attempt. She had, for example,
abandoned the _Rosenkavalier_ waltz, having never succeeded in
struggling through more than about ten bars of it, and those the
simplest. But her French