“And now no assurance would convince you that I am not very low-minded and vulgar. Well, I am, I suppose. Que voulez-vous? Only don’t be too much shocked by my frankness; don’t be prudish. A man may be propriety itself, but he may not be prudish. Remember that I am twenty-seven, that I know my world (though how I have been able to get my knowledge with such a dexterously shuffling and shielding Mamma, I don’t know), and that I think it merely silly to pretend that I don’t know it before a man with whom I am as intimate as I am with you. Of course, on the face of it, to accept money from a married man who is in love with one does suggest a situation usually described as immoral.”
Damier was feeling choked, feeling, too, that he almost hated Claire, as she walked beside him, slowly and lightly, opulently lovely, the flush of anger—it was more anger than shame—still on her cheek.
“I must tell you,” he said, in a voice steeled to a terrible courtesy, “that it is you alone who inform me of your indebtedness to Monsieur Daunay’s kindness. He, I now see, did not tell me everything.”
“What did he tell you, then?” she asked, stopping short in the path and fixing her eyes upon him, in her voice a rough, almost a plebeian, note.
“That he adored you, and that he could be trusted.”
“Well, he can be!” She broke into a hard laugh. “Le cher bon Daunay! I thought that of course he would paint a piteous picture of his woes. And now you are furious with me because I supposed that, as a man of the world, you might unfairly, yet naturally, imagine more than he told you.”
Damier made no reply.
“You are furious, are you not?”
“I am disgusted, but not for that reason only.”
“You think I am in love with him!” She stopped again in the narrow path. “I swear to you that I am not!” He would have interrupted her, but her volubility swept past his attempt. “If he had been free I would have married him—I own it; at one time, at least, I would have married him. I am French in my freedom from sentimental complications on that subject. I could have found no other man in this country willing to marry a dotless girl. I should have preferred, of course, a mariage d’amour; but, given my circumstances, could I have found anything more desirable than a kind, generous, and adoring friend like Monsieur Daunay?”