What to him was poetry—for, to a certain extent, she seemed to appreciate his attitude toward her mother—was to her the mere furniture of life. Damier resented, but for some time was helpless; she gave him no occasion for declaration or defense. Once or twice, when, à propos de bottes, as far as actual comment was required, he seriously spoke of his deep admiration for her mother, Claire listened with a cela-va-sans-dire expression vastly baffling. Only by degrees, and only after some definite sharpnesses on his side, did she seem to realize that, in including him in her own casual attitude toward her mother, she not only misinterpreted but irritated and antagonized him. After that realization she never so offended again. Indeed, with an air of honoring his fantastic sensitiveness, yet with gravity, as if to show him that she, too, could appreciate moral charm, the pathos of defeat and finality, she often alluded to her mother’s fine and gracious qualities; but, in spite of this concession, Damier was still aware of the indefinable difference that made the atmosphere seem disloyal.
She said one day: “You have really decided to live in Paris—for ever and ever—hein? Is it we you are studying? Do you find us interesting?”
“But the world is full of so many more interesting people,” said Claire, “than two ladies, one almost old and one rapidly leaving her youth behind her, who live the narrowest of lives and give lessons to make butter for their bread.”
“I have not met many more interesting.”
“Then it is—to study us?” Her sleepy smile was upon him.
Damier had certainly no intention of confiding in Claire the reasons for his stay in Paris, feeling suddenly, indeed, that the young woman herself formed a rather serious problem in all practical considerations of these reasons; yet the attitude implied in her question demanded a negative. “No, it isn’t because I am studying you; it is because I am fond of you,” he said, bringing out the words with a touch of awkwardness, feeling their simplicity to be almost crude.
Claire was reflectively silent for some moments, observing his face, he knew, though he was not looking at her.
“Vous êtes un original,” she said at last, with quite the manner of her race when abandoning, as impenetrable to rational probes, some specimen of British eccentricity.
On another day a little incident occurred, slight, yet destined to impress Damier with a deeper sense of Claire’s unsoundness. They were walking down the Champs-Elysées, in the windy brightness of a March afternoon, when, in the distance, near the Rond Point, they discerned the easily recognizable figure of Monsieur Daunay. Claire, as this old friend appeared upon the field of vision, put her hand in Damier’s arm and, drawing him toward one of the smaller streets that slope down to the spacious avenue, said, smiling unemphatically: “Don’t let us meet him.”