“How often you surprise me,” she said, “and how often you make me feel that I don’t, even yet, quite understand you! It is so difficult to realize that a person so comprehending can at the same time be so rigid. With you tout comprendre is not tout pardonner.”
“By no means,” Damier owned, unable to repress a smile.
“Well, I would far rather have you understand me completely, even if you can’t forgive. I told you that I was wicked; one good point I have: I never pretend to be better than I am.”
“And one better point you have, and that is that you are better than you know.” Damier spoke lightly, but at the moment he believed what he spoke.
Claire smiled without replying, and said, after a little silence:
“Of course you have seen how good Mamma is. You both of you have a moral perfume, and recognize it in each other. I puzzle and worry her so because I won’t suffer, won’t go out of my life into other people’s. You asked me how one could avoid suffering; really, for the most part, it is very easy to avoid. Sympathy is the fatal thing: to suffer with—why should one? It is a mere increasing of the suffering in the world, if one comes to think of it. The wise thing is to concentrate one’s self—to bring things to one’s self; but it is that wisdom that Mamma will not understand in me.”
Damier made no comment on these assertions, and Claire, as if she had expected none, as if, indeed, she were expounding herself and her mother for her own benefit as well as his, went on:
“She is very energetic, too, Mamma, as energetic as I am, but in a different way. She is always striving—against things; I wait. Even if she can’t see distinctly at what she is aiming, she is always aiming at something; I never aim unless I see something to aim at.”
“What things do you aim at?” he now asked.
“Oh—you know; things that Mamma despises—things that you too despise, perhaps, but that, at all events, you understand.” He could not quite interpret the glance that rested upon him. “And Mamma’s aims—I suppose you don’t care to hear what I think of them?”