she cried, waving her hand sidewise.
“The Countess is on—what you say—a diet?” said Yvonne sympathetically. “Eet ees the doctor’s orders—she cannot eat.”
“Rien du tout,” the Countess said again. “Nothing but horse’s blood, my dear,” the Countess said in a sad voice. “That’s all I live on now.”
“Horse’s blood!” he stared at her unbelievingly.
“Oui!” she nodded. “Sang de cheval! You see, my dear,” she went on in an explanatory tone, “I have anæmia—and by the doctor’s orders I take horse’s blood…. But the food here is so lovely. Lovely. I shall wait for you, my boy, and watch you eat.”
“Jean!” cried Yvonne sharply, giving the youth his freedom by one brisk act. “Les baggages de Monsieur. Numéro Sept.”
She handed the key to the porter.
“Oui, monsieur,” the porter said cheerfully, picking up the youth’s valise. “Par ici, s’il vous plaît.”
They went back and got into the little lift, just big enough for two. It mounted slowly, creakingly, with slatting rope. They got off at the first flight: he followed the porter down a thickly carpeted hall and then, while the man switched on lights, turned down the coverlet of the bed, and pulled the heavy curtains together in order to assure that atmosphere of stale nocturnal confinement without which sleep in France seems impossible, he examined the room.
The place easily lived up to all the rapturous prophesies which the Countess had made of it. It was astonishingly luxurious—with that almost indecent luxury that is characteristic of a French hotel room, and that is disquietingly similar to the luxury of a brothel. The bed was a lavish, canopied affair with crimson hangings; the floor was covered with a thick crimson carpet, completely noiseless to the tread; there was a sensually fat sofa and several fat chairs covered with fat, red plush and painted with gilt, a great gilt-rimmed mirror above the mantel, a washbowl of deep and heavy porcelain with glittering nickel fixtures, a lavish bidet, the inevitable provision of a French woman’s needs, and curtains of a fat, silk, quilted material whose sensual folds were now closely drawn together, completing the effect of bordello secrecy and luxury previously described.
And this oriental luxury was being provided to him for seventy cents a day on the recommendation of a mad old woman who drank horse’s blood and whom he had never seen until a half-hour ago. As he stood there bewildered by this new, strange turn of chance and destiny, he
