XI
It was odd, this hint of withdrawal and formality, in the midst of a greater kindness, when Claire occupied so much more conspicuously the foreground. She was now always with her mother; was a third in all talks and readings, listening, with eyes almost ironically vacant, her hands lying beautifully indolent in her lap, while Damier read aloud and her mother sewed. Claire did not seem to have stepped forward, but her mother seemed to have stepped back; and from the background—a mysterious one to his odd, new apprehension of things—she smiled more tenderly than before, and with yet a tremor, an intentness, as though expecting him to understand more than she could look.
And all this might be merely an emotional color in his own outlook on unchanged facts, but the color certainly was there, making a faintly tinted difference over all the mental landscape.
It was during the first days of this dim perplexity that he found himself alone once more with Madame Vicaud. He had outstayed all her guests on a Tuesday afternoon, and, the Viberts having taken Claire back to dine with them, Madame Vicaud asked the young man to share her solitude.
Now, when they were alone, and while he sat cutting the leaves of a new book they were to read together, she went about the room, putting things back in their places, closing the piano—a little restless in her restoration of composure to the room.
Presently she came to him, stood beside him, looking down at the book. “Always friends, you know,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and speaking lightly, almost incidentally.
“Why not?” Damier asked, looking up at her.
“Indeed, why not?” she returned, smiling. “Nothing, I hope, would ever change our friendship.”
“Nothing could.” She stood silently beside him, looking down, not at him, but at the volume of essays, and he added: “You will tell me if you are ever in any trouble or sorrow where I could help you, if ever so little?”