ly husband. Finally
she had become bored with the colonial drowsiness of Batavia and had
returned to Europe, breaking off her marriage in order to renew her
life in the great hotels, passing the winter season at the most
luxurious resorts.

"_Ay_, money!... In no social plane was its power so evident as that in
which she was accustomed to dwell. In the Palace Hotels she had met
women of soldierly aspect and common hands, smoking at all hours, with
their feet up and the white triangle of their petticoats stretched over
the seat. They were like the prostitutes waiting at the doors of their
huts. How were they ever permitted to live there!... Nevertheless, the
men bowed before them like slaves, or followed as suppliants these
creatures who talked with unction of the millions inherited from their
fathers, of their formidable wealth of industrial origin which had
enabled them to buy noble husbands and then give themselves up to their
natural tastes as fast, coarse women.

"I never had any luck.... I am too haughty for that kind of thing. Men
find me ill-humored, argumentative, and nervous. Perhaps I was born to
be the mother of a family.... Who knows but what I might have been
otherwise if I had lived in your country?"

Her announcement of her religious veneration for money took on an
accent of hate. Poor and well-educated girls, if afraid of the misery
of poverty, had no other recourse than prostitution. They lacked a
dowry,--that indispensable requisite in many civilized families for
honorable marriage and home-making.

Accursed poverty!... It had weighed upon her life like a fatality. The
men who had appeared good at first afterwards became poisoned, turning
into egoists and wretches. Doctor Talberg, on returning from America,
had abandoned her in order to marry a young and rich woman, the
daughter of a trader, a senator from Hamburg. Others had equally
exploited her youth, taking their share of her gayety and beauty only
to marry, later, women who had merely the attractiveness of a great
fortune.

She had finally come to hate them all, desiring their extermination,
exasperated at the very thought that she needed them to live and could
never free herself from this slavery. Trying to be independent, she had
taken up the stage.

"I have danced. I have sung; but my successes were always because I was
a woman. Men followed after me, desiring the female, and ridiculing the
actress. Besides--the life behind the scenes!.