“Hear me out, Fury. I did meet Marion: she saw me looking at the Hôtel Beaurepaire, and followed and accosted me; I did ask her what would she have to say to our taking a country jaunt together, and when, to my astonishment, she had nothing to express but approval, I did assert that you would never agree to such a proposal unless a replenished purse should enable you to take your share in the expenses. But I assured her explicitly that I spoke without your authority, that I did not even know if you would go if permitted, and that, as to the mention of money, it was made entirely on my own responsibility, and from inferences which you had had no intentional part in exciting. You must know, at least, that my only personal motive was to secure your consent to this trip—or, if you don’t, you should. I would much rather not be recouped for my little power of hospitality to one who repays me a thousandfold for it through the mere fact of her company.”
I got up as I spoke, and went and stood the other side of the table, so as to face her. She did not answer for awhile, nor look at me; but presently she raised her lids with a little smile, and, as it were, a flush of “rosy pudency.”
“I never thought you were really serious about this going away together,” she said. “It—it seems such a strange thing to do.”
There and then I destroyed my boats. I could not look at her longer, in her morning freshness, and play the sagacious self-critic. The burning feminine in her, the ready intelligence, the mental and the æsthetic qualifications, all proclaiming her a comrade of comrades for romantic venturings, ended my scruples in a sort of brain intoxication. Besides, where was the projected harm? Exercise and the liberal air would blow all that accumulated stuff of durance to the winds.
“Why?” I said. “Is gossip rifer under the open sky than in a closed room? We shall be safer from tongues, safer from possible hurt to reputation, to body, than we are here. We will be brother and sister, m’amie; you shall take my name—if you will condescend—and my conscience, and we will journey merrily in company, as witless of criticism as of guile. We will go South, even into the desolations of the Camargue, where no one would think of hunting for us, and, when you will, return leisurely by way of Orange and Fifine’s nest to Paris. Say it is settled.”
But, womanlike, she would not yield at once. She was full of tremors and scruples—fears of our being discovered and followed, alarm for the unconventionality of the proceeding. I was even exasperated on one occasion into twitting her with her “piano-tuner.” “There is no danger,” I said, “comparable with that invited by you yourself when you chose to entertain, unknown to me, and in spite of your solemn undertaking, a venerable stranger with a chrysanthemum bud in his buttonhole.”
She turned a little pale, I thought, at that, and, looking away, murmured indistinctly: “Madame Crussol allowed him to come up.”
“You mean it was not your doing. But he was admitted by you, was he not?”
Then she turned upon me, and broke out impulsively:—
“I would rather not say. Don’t ask me, Felix. If it was wrong, it shall not happen again.”