Page:Frank Owen - Woman Without Love (1949 reprint).djvu/126

 Now they were all gone and Madame sat with Ivan in her apartment, the apartment which had been nearest to home she had known in over forty years, and which, in the morning, she was leaving forever.

"I feel," she murmured, "as though once more all my past life is being burned away. I wonder if in the process I will become purified."

More and more, in her advancing years, Madame was turning to religion. She knew that she was an undesirable character, in most people's opinions. It did not bother her in the slightest. She went to church because she enjoyed the services. She was interested in studying the faces of the congregation. The smug hypocrisy, the upturned noses, the assumed sanctified expressions. The over-dressed females, the gloomy stolid-faced men. For religion itself Madame did not care a great deal. She liked its pomp. She liked to Join in the singing, even though her voice was raucous and harsh.

"You do not need to be purified," declared Ivan thoughtfully. "I have known you for years. I have never known you to be wrong, nor to be guilty of a small or mean act. True, you have run a house of love. You have catered to the unquenchable desires of men. If there be fault, the fault lies with Nature for so constituting society that it needs such houses. You have saved more girls than any other member of your church. You have done vast good. No girl has ever started on the downward path through the portals of your house and many have actually climbed back to the stars again. I tell you frankly that if there is a God, which of course is open to argument, and you are denied entrance to Heaven, then I shall be everlastingly grateful for permission to reside in hell."

"Thanks, Ivan," said she. "I shall miss you greatly when I am in New York."

"Perhaps, old friend," said he, "you will permit me to call upon you now and then when business calls me to your city. You know, being an artist, I am welcome everywhere, when as a matter of fact for that very reason I should be barred from all respectable homes."