You have a curious way of asking questions.—Yes, I did love her.
FELIX
And those moments must have been very happy ones, when you sat in that little garden with its overgrown fence, holding this canvas on your knees, and out there on the bright meadow, among all those red and white flowers, stood this young girl with anxiously smiling eyes, holding her straw hat in one hand.
JULIAN
Your mother talked of those moments that last evening?
FELIX
Yes.—It is childish perhaps, but since then it has seemed impossible to me that any other human being could ever have meant so much to you as this one?
JULIAN (more and more deeply moved, but speaking very quietly) I shall not answer you.—In the end I should instinctively be tempted to make myself appear better than I am. You know very well how I have lived my life—that it has not followed a regulated and direct course like the lives of most other people. I suppose that the gift of bestowing happiness of the kind that lasts, or of accepting it, has never been mine.
FELIX
That's what I feel. It is what I have always felt. Often with something like regret—or sorrow almost. But just people like you, who are destined by their very nature to have many and varied experiences—just such people should, I think, cling more faithfully and more gratefully to memories of a tender, peaceful sort, like this—rather than to more passionate and saddening memories.—Am I not right?