“What am I, that I should mean so much to you? You don’t know me.”
“Is that your kind way of intimating that I can mean nothing to you—that you don’t know me?” he smiled.
“Ah, don’t think that I am so hard and stupid!” she said quickly. “Don’t think that I am fencing with you, trying to ward off a friendship I can’t appreciate. Don’t think that I have no need of a friend. I have; I have—only I had forgotten to feel it. I do not say that I have no friends; you know that I have, and good ones—only you do not wish to rank with them. Isn’t it so?” She smiled swiftly, from her gravity, at him. “There is good Madame Dépressier, and the comtesse, and little Sophie,—who needs me, poor child, in her struggle and loneliness,—and the others, true and good all; but none near. You would be near,—would you not?—and have me share pain with you—lean on you, you say.” His fine young face, stern with eagerness, followed her words in silent assent. “But it would be difficult for me to have such a friend. I have never had such a friend. It is difficult, painful to me to show myself, be myself. I am a hard, I fear a spoiled, stunted nature. You heard—of course you must have heard; it is the one thing that anybody must hear who hears at all of me—that my marriage was very unhappy. It warped me; it froze me. There was no one to help me when I needed help, or to hear me, even had I not been too proud to call, and I lost the power of appeal or self-expression. If I had been gentler, less bitter in my despair, less rebellious, I might have kept more in touch with life, been more natural, more responsive. As it is, I can still feel—deeply, deeply; but it is hard for me to respond. I am old enough to be your mother. No? Well, almost.” She smiled slightly at his exactitude. “I am very different from the girl in the photograph whose eyes called to you—prophetic eyes they must have been! You must not expect fine things of me; you must not idealize me.” She put her hand gently, maternally on his shoulder. “Never idealize me. That is a dangerous—a terrible thing to do.”
“Can you look at me,” he asked, putting his hand on hers—“can you look at me and think that I could idealize you?—see you as anything else than you are? Don’t you feel that, indeed, I can see you much more clearly than you see yourself—the girl in the photograph, and the woman old enough, almost old enough, to be my mother? You are shut into your present. I see you in it—and in all your past.”
She stood looking gravely into his eyes as he looked into hers. In hers there was—not seen by him and hardly felt by herself—a swiftly passing, an immense regret, an immense sadness. It was like the sweeping shadow of a flying wing, and left only the limpidity of sweetest, most candid acquiescence. In his eyes, too, there was regret—passionate regret; and he felt it, and felt that she could not understand or read it, nor the vague, strong hope that so strangely informed it.
“So I have a friend, a new yet an old friend,” said Madame Vicaud. “You perplex me, but I believe in all you say. You give me great happiness.”
He lifted the hand under his and bent his lips to it. She looked down at his bowed head with a smile that was a benediction.
On that first day of their friendship, as they sat together, she again before her harp, it was, oddly, he who leaned and confided. Almost boyishly, under her comprehending eyes, he unfolded for her his life, its deepest efforts and its deepest disappointments. Madame Vicaud, while he talked and she questioned, drew her fingers softly, from time to time, across her harp-strings. He never forgot the hour, nor the sense of communion that the silvery ripple of the harp-strings made paradisiacal.
“And will you not marry? Have you not thought of marrying?” she asked.
He considered her with what he knew to be a whimsical smile at her unconsciousness.