On the last words his deep voice sounded sarcastic, almost patronizing.
Hermione fired up at once.
"None of that from you, Emile!" she exclaimed.
Artois stirred his tea rather more than was necessary, but did not begin
to drink it.
"You mustn't look down on me from a height," she continued. "I won't have
it. We're all on a level when we're doing certain things, when we're
truly living, simply, frankly, following our fates, and when we're dying.
You feel that. Drop the analyst, dear Emile, drop the professional point
of view. I see right through it into your warm old heart. I never was
afraid of you, although I place you high, higher than your critics,
higher than your public, higher than you place yourself. Every woman
ought to be able to love, and every man. There's nothing at all absurd in
the fact, though there may be infinite absurdities in the manifestation
of it. But those you haven't yet had an opportunity of seeing in me, so
you've nothing yet to laugh at or label. Now drink your tea."
He laughed a loud, roaring laugh, drank some of his tea, puffed out a
cloud of smoke, and said: "Whom will you ever respect?"
"Every one who is sincere--myself included."
"Be sincere with me now, and I'll go back to Paris to-morrow like a shorn
lamb. Be sincere about Monsieur Delarey."
Hermione sat quite still for a moment with the bundle of letters in her
lap. At last she said: "It's difficult sometimes to tell the truth about a feeling, isn't it?"
"Ah, you don't know yourself what the truth is."
"I'm not sure that I do. The history of the growth of a feeling may be
almost more complicated than the history of France."
Artois, who was a novelist, nodded his head with the air of a man who
knew all about that.
"Maurice--Maurice Delarey has cared for me, in that way, for a long time.
I was very much surprised when I first found it out."
"Why, in the name of Heaven?"
"Well, he's wonderfully good-looking."
"No explanation of your astonishment."
"Isn't it? I think, though, it was that fact which astonished me, the
fact of a very handsome man loving me."
"Now, what's your theory?"
He bent down his head a little towards her, and fixed his great, gray
eyes on her face.
"Theory! Look here, Emile, I dare say it's difficult for a man like you,
genius, insight, and all, thoroughly to understand how an ugly woman
regards beauty, an ugly woman like me, who's got intellect and passion
and intense feeling for form, color, every manifestation of beauty. When
I look at beauty I feel rather like a dirty little beggar staring at an
angel. My intellect doesn't seem to help me at all. In me, perhaps, the
sensation arises from an inward conviction that humanity was meant
originally to be beautiful, and that the ugly ones among us are--well,
like sins among virtues. You remember that book of yours which was and
deserved to be your one artistic failure, because you hadn't put yourself
really into it?"