“No; I think it wonderful, enthralling, if one attains one’s aims; it is all beautiful, even the suffering—if one avoids suffering one’s self.”
“You are an esthete—
While safe beneath the roof,
To hear with drowsy ear the plash of rain.”
“Oh, better than rain—the tempest!”
“And how can one avoid suffering, pray?”
“Mais,”—Claire had a tolerant smile for his naïveté,—“by staying under the roof, laughing round the fire. Mamma, you see, would be darting out continually into the storm.”
“Bringing other people back to shelter.”
“And crowding us uncomfortably round the fire, getting the rest of us wet!” smiled Claire. “For a case in point—don’t you find Sophie a bore? She was going to commit suicide when Mamma, through something Miss Vibert said, found her. Yes, I assure you, the charcoal was lit—her last sous spent on it. And really, do you know, I think it would have been a wise thing. Don’t be too much horrified at my heartlessness. I mean that Sophie will never enjoy herself; nothing in this world will ever satisfy her. When she has enough to eat she can realize more clearly her higher wants. And—I don’t want to seem more ungenerous than I am, but, as a result, we have less to eat ourselves. Don’t look so stony; I am not really un mauvais cœur. I would willingly dot Sophie, buy her the best husband procurable if I had the money; but husbands and houses and money wouldn’t make Sophie comfortable, and I don’t really see that much is gained by making two people less so in order to insure the survival of one unfit little Pole.”
“I need hardly tell you that I don’t share the ruthless materialism of that creed. Who, my dear young woman, are you, to pronounce on Sophie’s unfitness, and to decide that you, rather than she, have a right to survival?”
Claire looked at him for a moment with a smile unresentful and yet rueful.