"That's just what I do," she cried eagerly and almost angrily. Marchmont's words had brought back what Quisanté could be; surely a man's best must be what he really and truly is? Then his true self shows itself untrammelled; the measure of it is rather the heights to which it can rise than the level on which it moves at ordinary times. She remembered Quisanté on Duty Hill. "That's what I do, and you—you and all of them—don't. You fix on his small faults, faults of manner—oh, yes, and of breeding too, I daresay, perhaps of feeling too. But to see a man's faults is not to see the man." She rose to her feet and faced him. "I see him more truly than you do," she said proudly and defiantly. Then her face grew suddenly soft, and she caught his hand. "My dear friend, my dear, dear friend," she murmured, "don't be unkind to me. I'm not happy about it; how can I be happy about it? Don't make it worse for me; I'm trying to see the truth, and you might help me; but you only tell me what leaves out more than half the truth."
He would not or could not respond to her gentleness; his evil spirit possessed him; he gave expression to his anger with her and his scorn of his rival, not to his own love and his own tenderness.
"It turns me almost sick," he declared, "to think of you with him."
She let go his hand, moved away, and sat down. "If you're like that, I can say no more," she said. Her eyes were full of tears as she looked at him, but his heart was hard to her; to him she seemed to be humiliating both him and herself; the victory of Quisanté at once insulted him and degraded her. Here was a case where Alexander Quisanté, with all his defects, would have gone right, while Marchmont went wrong. It was a crisis, and Quisanté's insight would have taught him how to handle it, to assure her that whatever she did he would be the same to her, that though he might not understand he would be loyal, that his love only grew greater with his pain, that in everything that awaited her he would be ready with eager service and friendship unimpaired. None of this came from Marchmont's lips; he made no effort to amend or palliate his last bitter speech. He could not conquer his resentment, and it bred an answering resentment in her. "You must think what you like of me," she said, her voice growing cold again.
With the end of this interview, with the departure of Marchmont, still sore, angry, and blind to her point of view, May felt that the matter had settled itself. She knew in her heart that she would not have turned Marchmont away unless she had meant to bid Quisanté come. For a little while she struggled against finality, telling herself that the question was still an open one, and that to refuse one man was not of necessity to marry another. Other friends came and talked to her, but none of them got within her guard or induced her to speak freely to them. In the end she had to settle this thing for herself; and now it was settled.
Even when undertaken in the conviction of a full harmony of feeling, a community of mind, and an identity of tastes, marriage may startle by the extent of its demands. She was to marry a man—she faced the matter and told herself this—a man from whom she was divided by the training of a lifetime, by antagonisms of feeling so acute as to bite deep into their every-day intercourse, by a jarring of tastes which made him sometimes odious to her. In spite of the resentment to which Marchmont's scorn had stung her, she understood very well how it was that her friends failed to appreciate the motives of her action. To herself she could not justify it; it was taken on impulse, not calculation, and had to rest in the end on the vague effects of what she had seen in Quisanté, not continually, not in his normal state, but by fits and snatches, in scraps of time which, all added together, would scarcely fill the hours between luncheon and dinner. She took him on the strength of his moments; that was the case in plain English, reduced to its lowest terms and its baldest statement. Of confidence, of security, of trust she had none; their place was filled by a vague expectancy, an insistent curiosity, and a puzzled fearful fascination. Not promising materials these, out of which to make happiness. She surprised herself by finding how little happiness in its ordinary sense entered into her reckoning. Or if anything that we happen to want is to be called our happiness, then her happiness consisted in, and refused to be analysed into anything more definite than, a sort of necessity which she felt of being near to Alexander Quisanté, of sharing his mind and partaking of his life. But if this were happiness, then happiness was not what she had been accustomed to think it; where were the rest, the contentment, the placidity and satisfaction which the word was usually considered to imply?
Quisanté came to her, wreathed in triumph. It was a mood she liked him in; he offended her not when he celebrated success, but when he intrigued for it. His new-born confidence seemed to make any drawing-back on her part impossible; she had sent him, she was bound to reward the happy issue of her mission. Another thing touched her very deeply; while protesting his unworthiness of her, he based his humility on the special and wonderful knowledge of her that he possessed and referred it entirely to this inner secret excellence of hers and not in the least to her position or to any difference between his and hers. He did not suppose that society would be aghast or that the world at large would see cause for dismay in the marriage. He expected hearty congratulations for himself, but it was evident that he thought she would have her full share of them too; he had, in fact, no idea that May Gaston would not be thought to be doing very well for herself. This mixture of simplicity and self-appreciation, of ignorance of the mind of others combined with a knowledge of the claims of his own, took May's fancy; she laughed a little as she determined that the general opinion of the matter must be kept from his ears, and his robust confidence in the world's admiration of him preserved.
"You say you know me so well," she said. "I know very, very little of you; and of what I know there's a lot that's bad."
He was not in the temper that had inspired his confession of bad manners and bad morals on Duty Hill. He was inclined, as at such a moment he might be pardonably, to make light of his faults. He was not alarmed when she declared that if she found out anything very bad she would not after all become his wife.