“On the contrary, for you think very clearly. But I know what she has aimed at. What has she attained?”
He asked himself the question, indeed, with an inner lamentation for the one evident, the one tragic failure.
“Well,”—Claire clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of the window,—“for one thing, she has kept herself—she hasn’t attained it: that wasn’t needful—très grande dame. She has always made herself a social milieu congenial to her, or gone without one. For herself she would not choose and exclude so carefully; but I complicate Mamma’s spontaneous impulses. The social milieu has always been to her a soil in which to try to grow my soul; that is why she is so careful about the soil; if it were not for me she would probably choose the stoniest and ugliest, and beautify it by blooming in it, since her soul is strong and beneficent.”
Half repelled and half attracted as Damier had been, it was now with more of attraction than repulsion that he listened, an attraction that had many sources. That she should so finely appreciate her mother was one. It was touching—meant to be so, perhaps, for even in his attraction he had these moments of doubt; but a sincerity that could paint herself so unbecomingly and her mother so beautifully was a new revelation of her frankness. There was attraction, too, though of a mingled quality, in her strength and in her apparent indifference to his impression of her. These were better things than the glamour; yet that, too, he felt, as when she turned her eyes on him and said that the world was beautiful. At such moments something joyous and conscienceless in him responded to her, half intellectual comprehension and half mere flesh and blood. It was a little swirl of emotion that his soul, calm and disdainfully aloof, could look down on and observe, in no danger of being shaken by it; but it did swirl through him like a tremulous coil of Venusberg music; and Claire, in her transparent white, with her heavy braids and grave, shining eyes, gleamed at such moments with the baleful beauty of the eternal siren. As long as one was human something human in one must respond to that siren call. Even now, when he was feeling, with some bewilderment, better things in her, the glamour looking from her eyes, breathing from her serious lips, confused and troubled the new impulse of trust and pity. Half lightly, half sadly, yet with a very gentle kindliness, he said to her: “Strong enough to make you flower some day, let us believe”; and, as silently she still gazed upon him: “That you should recognize beauty is already a flower, you know.”
Still leaning back, her arms behind her head, still looking at him, Claire now said: “I owe that flower, not to her, but to you.”
He stared for a moment, not comprehending.
“You mean that you see her, appreciate her, through my sight, my appreciation?”
“Yes—in a sense, I mean that.”
“But,” said Damier, smiling, “you owe it to her that there is something beautiful to see.”