ls they walked upon the sunny front, for the weather was
perfect and the sun shone as it only shines at Brighton. Madame, I am
quite sure, did not sit upon the sand. It appears also that they
visited a succession of picture houses. Madame declares that she is
fascinated by this form of entertainment; the variety and rapid
movement delight her--as I admit they do my dull self--and she deeply
enjoys the blatant crudity of cinematic drama. "It is so entirely
unlike life that it transports one to another world," says she. "Here
in this strange visionary world of the pictures one lives in a
maelstrom of emotions. Boys and girls meet, embrace, and marry all
within the space of a few minutes upon the screen and of an hour or
two of dramatic action. Children are conceived and born by some
lightning process which it would be a happiness for the human kind to
learn. Heroes die while strong men bare their heads in grief, and ten
minutes later the corpse is capering joyously in a new piece. By
attending three or four houses in one afternoon one sups upon emotions
and feeds without restraint upon rich, satisfying laughter. Yes, _mon
ami_, I love the cinema. Rust did not, I think, greatly interest
himself in the pictures, but was happy in the darkness--holding my
hand."

She laughed as I broke into growls. "Is it not, _mon cher_" she went
on, "that the cinemas will always be most popular--however dull may be
the pictures--so long as boys and girls, men and women, who love,
desire to fondle one another's hands in the dark?"

"You and Rust did not love one another," I grunted.

"No. We were not the real thing, but we made ourselves into quite a
plausible imitation."

Madame pursued her programme with indefatigable ardour and patience.
She impressed again and again upon Rust's imagination a picture of
herself sleeping unprotected, in a room not far distant from his own,
while beneath her pillow reposed a paper precious and mysterious
beyond words to describe. She even hinted that a dread of fire, from
which she always suffered when sleeping at hotels, forbade the locking
of her door. "I am not afraid to die," said she, "for what have I to
bind me to life now that I can never visit the spot where repose the
shattered fragments of my beloved Capitaine Guilbert? But to be
burned, helpless, while rescue was cut off from me by a locked door! I
shrink from so terrible a fate." Subtlety, she had discovered, was
thrown away upon the obtuse