and worldly wisdom out of her mother’s breast—as if her hard heart and her cold, dark eyes had never known youth, remembered innocence, or been blinded by romantic fantasies—as if, in short, she had sprung full-armoured from her cradle, versed in all grim arts of seeking for one’s self, clutching her first sous in a sweating palm, learning to add by numbers before she could prattle a child’s prayer.
Seen so, the woman’s face had a cold and stern authority of mistrust that was impregnable. The face, indeed, might have been the very image of a hotel-keeper’s soul, impeccable in its perfection of bought courtesy, but hard, cold, lifeless, cruel as hell, obdurate as a block of granite, to any warming ray of mercy, pardon, or concession where another’s loss and its own gain might be concerned.
And yet, for all its cold and worldly inhumanity, the face was a passionate one as well. Her strong, black brows grew straight and thick in an unbroken line above her eyes, her upper lip was dark with a sparse but unmistakable moustache of a few black hairs, her face, at once cold and hard in its mistrust, and smouldering with a dark and sinister desire, was stamped with that strange fellowship of avarice and passion he had seen in the faces of women such as this all over France.
He had seen these women everywhere—behind the cashier’s desk in restaurants, shops, and stores, behind the desks in cafés, theatres, and brothels, or in the bureau of a hotel such as this. Sometimes they were alone, sometimes they were seated together behind one of those enormous tall twin desks, enthroned there like the very magistrates of gain, totting up the interminable figures in their ledgers with the slow care and minute painfulness of greed. They sat there, singly or two abreast, behind their tall desks near the door, casting their hard eyes in a glance of cold mistrust upon the customers and at each other, conspiring broodingly together as they checked and compared each other’s ledgers—seeming to be set there, in fact, not only as a watch upon the cheats and treasons of the world, but as a watch upon their own as well.
And yet, haired darkly on their upper lips, cold, hard, mistrustful in their grasping avarice as they might be, he had always felt in them the complement of a sinister passion. He felt that when all the day’s countings were over, the last entry made in the enormous ledger, the last figure added up, and the last drops of sweat wrung from the leaden visage of the final sous—then, then, he felt, they would pull down the shutters, bare their teeth in smiles of savage joy, and go to their appointed meeting with their
