l pounds a day for a room in an hotel, from which
that sight and that sound may be enjoyed.

One day, when reflections of this order had brought him once again to
the memory of the time when some one had spoken to him of Odette as of
a 'kept' woman, and when, once again, he had amused himself with
contrasting that strange personification, the 'kept' woman--an
iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities, embroidered,
as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers,
interwoven with precious jewels--with that Odette upon whose face he
had watched the passage of the same expressions of pity for a sufferer,
resentment of an act of injustice, gratitude for an act of kindness,
which he had seen, in earlier days, on his own mother's face, and on
the faces of friends; that Odette, whose conversation had so frequently
turned on the things that he himself knew better than anyone, his
collections, his room, his old servant, his banker, who kept all his
title-deeds and bonds;--the thought of the banker reminded him that he
must call on him shortly, to draw some money. And indeed, if, during the
current month, he were to come less liberally to the aid of Odette in
her financial difficulties than in the month before, when he had given
her five thousand francs, if he refrained from offering her a diamond
necklace for which she longed, he would be allowing her admiration for
his generosity to decline, that gratitude which had made him so happy,
and would even be running the risk of her imagining that his love
for her (as she saw its visible manifestations grow fewer) had itself
diminished. And then, suddenly, he asked himself whether that was not
precisely what was implied by 'keeping' a woman (as if, in fact, that
idea of 'keeping' could be derived from elements not at all mysterious
nor perverse, but belonging to the intimate routine of his daily life,
such as that thousand-franc note, a familiar and domestic object, torn
in places and mended with gummed paper, which his valet, after paying
the household accounts and the rent, had locked up hi a drawer in
the old writing-desk whence he had extracted it to send it, with four
others, to Odette) and whether it was not possible to apply to Odette,
since he had known her (for he never imagined for a moment that she
could ever have taken a penny from anyone else, before), that title,
which he had believed so wholly inapplicable to her, of 'kept' woman. He
could