THE EQUINOX
she was seductive, alluring, a Messalina rather than an
Aspasia,
Chienne de race!
She was young, and her lips
rather sneered than smiled, rather gloated than sneered.
One
instinctively muttered the word cmn/liba].
She had a perfect
and perverse enjoyment of life, a perfect and perverse con-
tempt of life; the contempt of the philosopher, the enjoyment
of the wallowing pig.
Porcus e grege Epicuri.
This much Edgar Rolles smelt rather than saw; for as he
turned to her, he caught her eyes.
They were the eyes of an
enthusiast, of a saint, of an ascetic—but of a saint who, strong
in his agony through faith and hope and love, still endures
the Dark Night of the Soul.
"You shall lunch with me, nice boy " (she said), ”and beg
my pardon for your stumble, and pay for your lunch by tell-
ing me what drives you mad with laughter at the sight of the
Pantheon.
Is it ‘L’homme aux trois sous’?”
For so the
irreverent Frenchman, mindful of his daily need, calls Rodin’s
" Le Penseuri"
“ Mademoiselle,” said Rolles, “I accept your kind invita—
tion; I abandon the Church for the Tavern."
They turned
into the Taverne du Pantheon, threading their way through
the professors and their mistresses, a clever, incurious,domestic,
fascinating crowd.
“I kiss your hands and your feet, and I will tell you the
joke before lunch; so that you may repent in time if it is not
amusing
In your ear, enchantressl
The truth is—I am a
great man.”
She saw it in a flash.
”Then, my friend, I must bury
you I"
" In your hair I ” he cried.
She had huge rolling masses of
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