XIII
This young woman appeared quite punctually, walking at a leisurely pace along the sanded path, where the full summer foliage cast flickering purple shadows. Claire was all in white, white that fluttered about her as she walked; her hat, tilted over her eyes, had white wings—like a Valkyrie’s summer helmet; her white parasol made a shadowed halo behind her head. As she approached him she looked at him steadily, with something whimsical, quizzical in her gaze, and her first words showed no wish to beat about the bush.
“You talked to him last night? I talked a little to Mamma, or rather she talked to me. I soon satisfied her that I didn’t feel for him, pas grand comme ça d’amour.” Claire indicated the smallness she negatived by a quarter of an inch of finger-tip. “And I think I can soon satisfy you, too,” she added. “He told you everything?”
“Everything.”
“And you are terribly shocked that an unmarried young woman should take money from a married man who is in love with her? Must I assure you that our relations are absolutely innocent?”
In his stupefaction, Damier could hardly have said whether her first statement or the coolness of her second remark—its forestalling of a suspicion she took for granted in him—were the more striking. Both statement and remark revealed her character in a light more lurid than even he had been prepared for. He was really unable to do more than stare at her. Claire evidently misinterpreted the stare yet more outrageously. She had the grace to flush faintly, though her eyes were still half ironic, half defiant.
“I do so assure you.”
“I did not need the assurance.” Damier found his voice, but it was hoarse.
Claire, in a little pause, looked her consciousness of having struck a very false note.