So the day passed. They lunched together and dined together. In the intervals they walked upon the sunny front, for the weather was perfect and the sun shone as it only shines at Brighton. Madame, I am quite sure, did not sit upon the sand. It appears also that they visited a succession of picture houses. Madame declares that she is fascinated by this form of entertainment; the variety and rapid movement delight her--as I admit they do my dull self--and she deeply enjoys the blatant crudity of cinematic drama. "It is so entirely unlike life that it transports one to another world," says she. "Here in this strange visionary world of the pictures one lives in a maelstrom of emotions. Boys and girls meet, embrace, and marry all within the space of a few minutes upon the screen and of an hour or two of dramatic action. Children are conceived and born by some lightning process which it would be a happiness for the human kind to learn. Heroes die while strong men bare their heads in grief, and ten minutes later the corpse is capering joyously in a new piece. By attending three or four houses in one afternoon one sups upon emotions and feeds without restraint upon rich, satisfying laughter. Yes, _mon ami_, I love the cinema. Rust did not, I think, greatly interest himself in the pictures, but was happy in the darkness--holding my hand."
She laughed as I broke into growls. "Is it not, _mon cher_" she went on, "that the cinemas will always be most popular--however dull may be the pictures--so long as boys and girls, men and women, who love, desire to fondle one another's hands in the dark?"
"You and Rust did not love one another," I grunted.
"No. We were not the real thing, but we made ourselves into quite a plausible imitation."
Madame pursued her programme with indefatigable ardour and patience. She impressed again and again upon Rust's imagination a picture of herself sleeping unprotected, in a room not far distant from his own, while beneath her pillow reposed a paper precious and mysterious beyond words to describe. She even hinted that a dread of fire, from which she always suffered when sleeping at hotels, forbade the locking of her door. "I am not afraid to die," said she, "for what have I to bind me to life now that I can never visit the spot where repose the shattered fragments of my beloved Capitaine Guilbert? But to be burned, helpless, while rescue was cut off from me by a locked door! I shrink from so terrible a fate." Subtlety, she had discovered, was thrown away upon the obtuseness of Rust. She was compelled to be brutally plain, and so she drove into his thick head the tempting fact that nothing interposed during the hours of darkness between his eager hands and the paper which she had taught him to covet. If she awoke and mistook his motives--if she thought that he had ventured into her room with designs upon her honour--Rust felt sure that her kind heart would forgive him, by breakfast-time, though she would certainly dismiss him from her bedside with the most haughty of reproaches. If he could not find some other way before they separated for the night, he had almost decided to essay the venture. She slept very soundly, said Madame; she had not awakened in her _appartement_ in Paris upon one night when a bomb from a Prussian aeroplane had exploded within two hundred yards of her house. Another way was still possible, and Rust, while he was dressing for dinner, determined to try it; it was a way, too, which thrilled him with pleasurable anticipation.