Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/134

 She wished Ottilia wouldn't smile like that with her eyes. Was she smiling just because she took that friendly interest which all Latins have in an intrigue, or because she thought it ridiculous in a woman of her age to have a lover? She must be about the same age as Ottilia, although Ottilia looked ten years older. Would Ottilia be going downstairs to regale other servants below with the tale? What did it matter? What did anything matter? "It is silly," she thought, "for a woman of my age and experience to behave always as if it were the first time, always worrying what people might say, always afraid of being caught." There wasn't anybody in the world who cared if she was caught, certainly not Faustino. A husband like that could be made cocu a thousand times in public and he wouldn't care at all so long as she gave him money for electric toys and a train to run by real steam around the garden at Venterollo—"like the children in the Bois riding to the Jardin d'Acclimatation the way I used to do. My God! How long ago was that? I mustn't think of it. I mustn't think. Perhaps that's why I've always kept my lovers so long, because it's always like the first time, always a renewal, a rebirth of love, rising from its own ashes. It was always exciting when it was like that. There was no growing blasé."

For a long time she lay in the hot water, allowing it to soothe her, to set loose all the nerves made taut by the wretched visit to the Villa Leonardo. When at last she rose and dried herself, she covered her body with a scented powder made for herself alone, and then fell to regarding it in the mirror.