“I referred to the present,” I answered coldly; “and, as you take it so, I will speak in your person as I would have you speak. ‘Jean-Louis,’ you say, ‘I am, like all sweet women, an agglomerate of truths and inconsistencies; yet I am not, in the midst of my wilfulness, insensible to the suffering my caprice of misunderstanding puts you to; and, in face of the equivocal character of our intercourse, I will forego the blindness that is a privilege of my sex. Speak boldly, then, what lies in your heart.’”
As I spoke in some trepidation, Carinne’s face grew enigmatical with hardness and a little pallor, and she looked steadily away from me.
“I thank you,” she said softly, “for that word ‘equivocal.’ But please to remember, monsieur, that this ‘intercourse’ is none of my seeking.”
“You choose to misapprehend me.”
“Oh! it is not possible,” she cried, turning sharply upon me. “You take advantage of my condescension and of the wicked licence of the times. Have you sought, by this elaborate process, to entrap me into a confession of dependence upon you? Why” (she measured me scornfully with her eyes), “I think I look over and beyond you, monsieur.”
“Now,” I said, stung beyond endurance by her words, “I pronounce you, mademoiselle, the most soulless, as you are the most beautiful, woman I have ever encountered. I thought I loved you with that reverence that would subscribe to the very conditions that Laban imposed upon Jacob. I see I was mistaken, and that I would have bartered my gold for a baser metal. And now, also, I see, mademoiselle, that the callousness you displayed in presence of the murdered Lepelletier, which I had fain fancied was a paralysis of nerve, was due in effect to nothing less vulgar than an unfeeling heart!”
She stared at me in amazement, it seemed. I was for the moment carried quite beyond myself.
“I will leave you,” I cried, “to your better reflections—or, at least, to your better judgment. This Thibaut will walk off the high fever of his presumption, and return presently, your faithful and obedient servant.”
I turned, fuming, upon my heel, and strode off amongst the trees. I had not gone a dozen paces when her voice stayed me. I twisted myself about.
“Do not lift your head so high, monsieur,” she said, “or you will run it against a mushroom and hurt yourself.”