She became silent, and he, watching her, was silent too. What was this strangeness of which she spoke? He felt it too but without understanding it. It caused in him a vague discomfort, an apprehension that some obstacle was between them, something more than any external hindrance, a thing which might perhaps remain though all external hindrance were removed. Her last words both puzzled and wounded him with their implication of a deeper sympathy between Quisanté and herself than existed or could exist between her and him. That he did not understand, and could not without giving up his own idea of her, the May Gaston which, as she said, he had made for himself. Was his image gone indeed? Had Alexander Quisanté's chisel altered the features beyond recognition and till true identity was gone? Yet Alexander Quisanté was the man who had put on her the shame for which she had sobbed under the tree on that evening at Ashwood. Before such a seeming contradiction his penetration stood baffled. She had said then that her present life would, she supposed, go on right to the end, and had said it as though the prospect were unendurable; now a new and to him unnatural resignation seemed to have come upon her, just when her present life had shown that it was not likely to go on right to the end.
"I've prayed my husband to give up," she said, "I don't beg you not to give up. To begin with, you wouldn't listen to me any more than he did. And then, I suppose, you're right for yourself."
"You're about the only person who'll say so."
"I daresay. I've learnt about you in learning about myself. And I can feel it just as you do—Oh, how intolerably strongly sometimes!" She added with a smile, "We've only just missed suiting one another," and then, "Yes, but we have missed, you know."
"I don't believe it," he persisted, struggling to throw off the new doubt she was thrusting into his mind. His thought was that, once she got free of her husband, she would indeed be his. That he must hold to. It was Quisanté, not she herself, who made her now feel strange to him; and Quisanté's spell was not to last; her quiet certitude that her husband's days were numbered carried conviction to him also. "But I won't talk any more about it now," he said.
"No, it seems inhuman," she agreed. "I spend all my days cheating myself into a hope that he'll get better. I know you don't like him, but if you lived with him as I do, you'd come to hope as I do. Yes, in spite of all you know about us; and you know more than anybody alive. I've not been so—so disloyal—to anybody else." She smiled as she quoted the word against him.
"One must admire him," said Marchmont.
May Quisanté laughed at his tone almost scornfully. "The way you say that shows how little you understand," she exclaimed. "It's not a bit like that." She took a step nearer to him. "When it comes," she said slowly, "I shan't shed a single tear, but I shall feel that my life's over. He'll have had it all."
"God forbid you should feel anything like that," he said, looking up at her.
She laughed again, asking bitterly, "Does God forbid what Alexander wants—except one thing? And what I tell you is what he would want. He would want to have had it all."