Edna still felt dazed when she got outside in the open air. The Doctor's
coupe had returned for him and stood before the porte cochere. She did
not wish to enter the coupe, and told Doctor Mandelet she would walk;
she was not afraid, and would go alone. He directed his carriage to meet
him at Mrs. Pontellier's, and he started to walk home with her.
Up--away up, over the narrow street between the tall houses, the stars
were blazing. The air was mild and caressing, but cool with the breath
of spring and the night. They walked slowly, the Doctor with a heavy,
measured tread and his hands behind him; Edna, in an absent-minded way,
as she had walked one night at Grand Isle, as if her thoughts had gone
ahead of her and she was striving to overtake them.
"You shouldn't have been there, Mrs. Pontellier," he said. "That was no
place for you. Adele is full of whims at such times. There were a dozen
women she might have had with her, unimpressionable women. I felt that
it was cruel, cruel. You shouldn't have gone."
"Oh, well!" she answered, indifferently. "I don't know that it matters
after all. One has to think of the children some time or other; the
sooner the better."
"When is Leonce coming back?"
"Quite soon. Sometime in March."
"And you are going abroad?"
"Perhaps--no, I am not going. I'm not going to be forced into doing
things. I don't want to go abroad. I want to be let alone. Nobody has
any right--except children, perhaps--and even then, it seems to me--or
it did seem--" She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherency of
her thoughts, and stopped abruptly.
"The trouble is," sighed the Doctor, grasping her meaning intuitively,
"that youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of
Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no
account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create,
and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost."
"Yes," she said. "The years that are gone seem like dreams--if one might
go on sleeping and dreaming--but to wake up and find--oh! well! perhaps
it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain
a dupe to illusions all one's life."
"It seems to me, my dear child," said the Doctor at parting, holding her
hand, "you seem to me to be in trouble. I am not going to ask for your
confidence. I will only say that if ever you feel moved to give it to
me, perhaps I might help you. I know I would understand. And I tell you
there are not many who would--not many, my dear."