“What would a chance have done for you? You have had every chance to be noble and loving and happy—yes, happy.”
“But not in my own way!—not in my own way!” she cried, and now she clasped both hands on his arm and leaned against his shoulder as she looked into his face. “I needed power and wealth—all the real foundations of happiness and nobility. Then—ah, then I should have blossomed. Or else, failing them, I needed liberty and joy—the life of a bohemian. I have had neither the one nor the other, and if I seem almost wicked to you it is because of that; for, to me, wickedness means going against one’s nature. I have always been forced to go against mine; I have never had a chance.”
Damier gave a mirthless laugh. “On the contrary, to me wickedness means going with one’s nature.”
“Ah, there we differ; and yet we understand.”
Again he had that feeling of perplexity and irritation. Her eyes, the clasp of her hands upon his arm, irked and troubled him, and without, now, any sense of glamour in the trouble and irritation. She seemed to make too great a claim upon his understanding, and to rely too much upon some conviction of her own charm that could dare any frankness just because it was so sure of triumph. He felt that at the moment he did not understand her; he felt, too, that he did not want to—that he was tired of understanding her.
“You are an unhappy creature, Claire,” he said. They were nearing the Porte Dauphine, and while he spoke with a full yet distant gravity, Damier looked about for a fiacre. “An unhappy creature with an unawakened soul.”
“Will you try to wake it, the poor thing?” asked Claire. She still held his arm, though he had tried to disengage it, and though she spoke softly, there was a vague hardness in her eyes, as though she felt the new hardness in him, though as yet not quite interpreting its finality.
“I shouldn’t know how to: I am helpless before it. It should be made to suffer,” he said. A cab had answered his summons, and he handed her into it. “No, I cannot go home with you,” he said. “Are you going home?”
“I am going to lunch with old Mademoiselle Daunay, and see Monsieur Daunay there. I had no chance to speak to him last night.” Claire, sitting straightly in the open cab, had an expression of perplexity and of growing resentment on her face; but as he merely bowed and was about to turn away, she started forward and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Are you going to make it suffer?” she asked. He looked into her eyes. He did not understand her, but he saw in them a demand at once alluring and threatening. His one instinct was to deny strongly whatever she demanded, though he did not know what that was.