She had seen her youth vanish, her freshness disappear, her hopes die,
and now she felt her flaming middle-age slipping away from her. No
wonder that with her admirably dressed, abundant hair, thickly sprinkled
with white threads and adding to her elegant aspect the piquant
distinction of a powdered coiffure--no wonder, I say, that she clung
desperately to her last infatuation for that graceless young scamp, even
to the extent of hatching for him that amazing plot. He was not so far
gone in degradation as to make him utterly hopeless for such an attempt.
She hoped to keep him straight with that enormous bribe. She was clearly
a woman uncommon enough to live without illusions--which, of course, does
not mean that she was reasonable. She had said to herself, perhaps with
a fury of self-contempt "In a few years I shall be too old for anybody.
Meantime I shall have him--and I shall hold him by throwing to him the
money of that ordinary, silly, little girl of no account." Well, it was
a desperate expedient--but she thought it worth while. And besides there
is hardly a woman in the world, no matter how hard, depraved or frantic,
in whom something of the maternal instinct does not survive, unconsumed
like a salamander, in the fires of the most abandoned passion.
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