“Sorry for her? Because of her dull, bleak life? Ah, have I not been sorry, too?”
“But I not for that,” said Damier, “not for that; but because she made me so sorry for you; because”—and he looked at her—“because you do not love her.”
He was still at a distance from her, and across it her look met his in a long silence.
Then a strange, a tragic thing happened to her. He had before seen her flush faintly; but it was now a deep, an agonizing blush that slowly rose and darkened in her face. The revelation of look and blush was long before she leaned her elbows on the chair-back and covered her face with her hands.
“Forgive me!” Damier murmured. He felt as if he had stabbed her. He came to her, and, half kneeling on the chair before her, he longed, but did not dare, to put his arms around her and sweep away this complication, and all the others—ah, the others?—the years and years of them that rolled between them!—in a full and final confession. “Forgive me for seeing—it is not your fault; it is my clear-sightedness—“
She made no reply.
“You try to understand her, but she is alien to you. She tears at every fiber of you. There is nothing in her that does not hurt you,” Damier said, hastening to speak all the truth, since the moment inevitably had come for it.
Madame Vicaud lifted her head.
“I do understand her,” she said. She did not look at him. Straightening her shoulders, drawing a long breath, she walked away from him to the window; there, her back to him, she added, the truth seemingly forced from her as it had been from him, “And I hate her.”
Damier remained leaning against the chair. The situation, in its strangeness, dazed him. But looking at her figure, dark against the light, he was able to say: “I even guessed that—almost.”