month— et après, le déluge! Mais tu ne peux comprendre. Va! Away, away! You are not worth it.— Ah, que fais-tu? ”
For, while drawing on the other stocking, I had felt constrained to kiss her. Immediately she shrunk back, kicked me in the face with her toes, and turned me neck and crop out of the room.
“ Eh bien, mon ‘ utchitel ,’ ” she called after me, “ je t’attends, si tu veux. I start in a quarter of an hour’s time.”
I returned to my own room with my head in a whirl. It was not my fault that Polina had thrown a packet in my face, and preferred Mr. Astley to myself. A few banknotes were still fluttering about the floor, and I picked them up. At that moment the door opened, and the landlord appeared—a person who, until now, had never bestowed upon me so much as a glance. He had come to know if I would prefer to move to a lower floor—to a suite which had just been tenanted by Count V.
For a moment I reflected.
“No!” I shouted. “My account, please, for in ten minutes I shall be gone.”
“To Paris, to Paris!” I added to myself. “Every man of birth must make her acquaintance.”
Within a quarter of an hour all three of us were seated in a family compartment— Mlle. Blanche, the Widow de Cominges, and myself. Mlle. kept laughing hysterically as she looked at me, and Madame reechoed her; but I did not feel so cheerful. My life had broken in two, and yesterday had infected me with a habit of staking my all upon a card. Although it might be that I had failed to win my stake, that I had lost my senses, that I desired nothing better, I felt that the scene was to be changed only for a time . “Within a month from now,” I kept thinking to