“She will marry!” cried Damier. “She must marry Monsieur Daunay.”
“I do not think that she will marry him; but if she does marry, I could not separate my life from hers, though then I could see you again, but as friend, as friend only.”
Damier burst out into a smothered invective:
“And you think of sacrificing the rest of your life to that creature—who has no love for you—whom you cannot love! What can you do for her? You can never change or soften her.”
He felt that the vehemence of his despair and rebellion dashed itself against a rocky inflexibility, although she still bent her head upon her hand with the same deep weariness, not looking at him, still spoke on with the same monotonous patience:
“I cannot call the fulfilling of the most rudimentary maternal duty a sacrifice. You forget that my youth is past, and that with it the time for sacrifices is past, too. I have no claims on life. Life, at my age and in my position, can only be a dedication. I can, perhaps, never soften or change her: but I can still protect her; I can still lend her the dignity, such as it is, of my home and my companionship. And I can pity her, most piteous creature—whose mother has no love for her.”
“Ah, you do not love me!” cried Damier, and all his youth was in the cry. “You sacrifice me with such composure! You give yourself to have your life sucked out of you by this vampire shape of the past. And it is me you rob! It is my life you immolate, as well as your own! What of my claim on life—my claim on you? You have no conception of what you are to me, or you could not speak of shutting me out from you; you could not think of sending me away! You could not speak so—think so—if you loved me!”
From her chair she now looked up at him, not with weariness, with a look curiously vivid and tender. “You speak like a boy,” she said.
Damier flung himself on his knees beside her. “And you think that I can leave you when you can look at me like that—love me like that!”
“Because I do.” She let him take her hands, and went on, almost smiling at him: “Because I love you like that, and because you love me like that, and because I am so much older than you—can’t you feel it? how like a little boy—passionate, unruly in his grief—you seem to me! And because, in spite of my age and your boyishness, we do yet love each other so greatly that the very greatness of our love makes the question of our being together or apart really of not such significance.”