d
now, for months, a corner of Rue Prony had been silent and drowsy, and
weighted with the melancholy that surrounds forsaken objects.

It was here that Marianne, in carrying out her determination, entered
with a high head, resolved to cast off her sombre misery or to sink, her
plans defeated. The Dujarrier had greatly assisted her in taking up her
abode, building her hopes on Mademoiselle Kayser's beauty as on some
temporary profitable investment. As the old woman looked at her, she
shook her head. Marianne had to be quick. She was pale, already weary,
and her beauty, heightened by this weariness, was "in full blast," as
the former bungling artiste said in her capacity of a connoisseur.

"After all," Dujarrier said to herself, "it is the favorable moment for
success. One does not become a _general_ except through seniority."

Marianne also experienced the same feelings as the Dujarrier. She
realized that she had reached the turning-point of her life, it was like
a game of baccarat that she was playing with fate. She might come out of
it rich and preserved from the possibility of dying in a hospital or a
hovel after having dragged her tattered skirts through the streets, or
overwhelmed with debts, ruined forever, strangled by liabilities. This
commercial term made her smile ironically when she thought of it.
Against her she had her past, her adventurous life, almost the life of a
courtesan, carried away by the current of her amorous whims; it now
needed only the burden of liabilities for her to become not only
completely disclassed, but ruined by Parisian life. She had given the
Dujarrier receipts for all that that quasi-silent-partner had advanced
her, the old lady excusing herself for the precaution she took by saying
precisely:

"In that way one can hold people. Grateful acknowledgments are good;
written acknowledgments are better!"

The Dujarrier considered herself witty.

Marianne had signed, moreover, all that the other had asked. She still
needed, indeed, to make further outlay. And what mattered it if she
plunged deeper while she was _taking a dive_, as she expressed it in her
language, which was a mixture of street slang and the elegant
phraseology of the salon.

"Bah! I know how to swim."

She suddenly straightened herself under this anxiety, reassured,
moreover, and spurred on as she was by the Dujarrier herself, who said
as she shrugged her shoulders:

"When a woman like you has a man like Vaudrey