"Do you think so?" said the Inward Monitor.
"Any way," said Betty, putting her foot down on the Inward Monitor, "I'm going to do it. If it's only for Paula's sake. We'll take rooms, and I'll go to a Studio, and work hard; and I won't make friends with gentlemen I don't know, or anything silly, so there," she added defiantly. "Auntie left the money for me to study in Paris. If I tell my step-father that Madame Gautier is dead, he'll just fetch me home, and what'll become of Paula then?"
Thus and thus, ringing the changes on resolve and explanation, her thoughts ran. A clock chimed midnight.
"Is it possible," she asked herself, "that it's not twelve hours since I was at the Hotel Bête--talking to Him? Well, I shall never see him again, I suppose. How odd that I don't feel as if I cared whether I did or not. I suppose what I felt about him wasn't real. It all seems so silly now. Paula is real, and all that I mean to do for her is real. He isn't."
She prayed that night as usual, but her mind was made up, and she prayed outside a closed door.
Next morning, when her chocolate came up, she carried it into the next room, and, sitting on the edge of her new friend's bed, breakfasted there.
Paula seemed dazed when she first woke, but soon she was smiling and listening to Betty's plans.
"How young you look," said Betty, "almost as young as me."
"I'm twenty-five."
"You don't look it--with your hair in those pretty plaits, and your nightie. You do have lovely nightgowns."
"I'll get up now," said Paula. "Look out--I nearly upset the tray."
Betty had carefully put away certain facts and labelled them: "Not to be told to anyone, even Paula." No one was to know anything about Vernon. "There is nothing to know really," she told herself. No one was to know that she was alone in Paris without the knowledge of her relations. Lots of girls came to Paris alone to study art. She was just one of these.
She found the lying wonderfully easy. It did not bring with it, either, any of the shame that lying should bring, but rather a sense of triumphant achievement, as from a difficult part played excellently.
She paid the hotel bill, and then the search for rooms began.
"We must be very economical, you know," she said, "but you won't mind that, will you? I think it will be rather fun."