Then I went out and locked the door behind me, putting the key in my pocket.
I went down the passage slowly. My heart was beating fast and I felt angry, but the anger was not that deep fierce agony of emotion I had felt at times when Viola angered or grieved me.
It was more a superficial sensation of disgust and repulsion that filled me, and, after a few minutes, I grew calm and recovered my self-possession.
"What could I expect from a girl like this?" I asked myself. "What could I expect but lies and deceit and trickery and infidelity? She had shewn me all these at Sitka when I first met her."
I had been willing enough to profit by them, but even then they had disgusted me. Now I was in the position of Hop Lee, and as she had treated him so would she treat me. It was true she professed to love me, and did so in her way. But it was the way of the woman who is bought and sold.
And why should I feel specially repelled because I had found her with a servant? Had she not come from a tea-shop in Sitka, where she herself was serving?
The Mexican boy was handsome enough. Doubtless he presented a temptation to her.
It was all my own fault, everything that had happened or would happen, for choosing such an unsuitable companion. The light loves of an hour with painted butterflies such as Suzee are well enough, but for life together one must seek and find one's equal, one who sees with the same eyes, who has the same standard as one's own of the fitness of things, in whose veins runs blood of the same quality as one's own.
Why had Viola left me? The thought came with a pang of anguish as my heart called out for her.
The corridor was a lofty one of stone. It was quite empty now and unlighted. I walked on slowly in the dark till I came to a large window on my right hand. This window overlooked a wide expanse of lead roofs belonging to the lower stories of the hotel, and these commanded a magnificent view of the whole city.
I stepped out over the low sill and stood on the leads. The night was soft and cool. The sky, full of the light of a rising moon, shewed beautifully, against its luminous violet, the outlines of dome and minaret and spire, and far out beyond the crowded city's confines, the two incomparable mountains, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, the huge volcanoes, shrouded in eternal snow, rising a sheer ten thousand feet from the level plain, standing like sentinels guarding the city.