at all the tea in China will never wash off.
Where shall I begin?"

"Where we left off," said Esther. "We left Mr. Wharton in the church at
eleven o'clock, and the woman marching up and down outside."

"At noon I found her there, and knew her at once, though it is ten years
since I last saw her. She is a person whom one does not forget. I asked
her what she wanted. It seemed that Wharton, in his confusion, had told
her to come to his studio without saying where it was; and she was
waiting for him to come out again. I gave her the address and sent her
away. Then I went up to Wharton whom I found in a strange state of mind;
he seemed dazed and showed no interest in the affair. He would not talk
of his wife at all until I forced him. At length, after a struggle, as
he said that Miss Dudley had told him to go to her uncle, Mr. Murray, I
got him into a carriage and we drove to Mr. Murray's office. The upshot
was that Mr. Murray and I took the matter into our hands and decided to
meet the woman ourselves in his company. At the hour fixed, we went, all
three of us, to the studio.

"It needed at least three of us to deal with that one woman. When I saw
her in Paris she was still young and handsome, with superb eyes and a
kind of eastern tread. You could imagine her, when she did not speak, as
Semiramis, Medea, Clytemnestra! Except that when you saw a little more
of her, you felt that she was only a heroine of a cheap theater. Wharton
could not have been fascinated by her, if, at that time of his life, he
had ever known a refined woman or mixed at all in the world; but she
certainly had a gypsy charm, and seemed to carry oceans of Sahara and
caravans of camels about with her. When she was in one of her furies, it
was an echo of the whole Greek drama. This, you must recollect, was ten
years ago, and even then she was spoiled by being coarse and
melodramatic, but now she is a horror. She suggests nothing but the
penitentiary. When she saw that there were three of us, she flew into a
whirlwind of passion, and screamed French that I was glad to find I
could not wholly understand. Her dialect must come from the worst class
of Parisian thieves. I should have been glad to understand less than I
did. Every now and then she interrupted this Billingsgate, and seemed to
think that her dignity required a loftier style, and she poured out on
us whole pages of cheap melodrama. She began by flinging her fur cap and
cloak on the floor and str