Her mood changed. “I am sad—ver’ sad.... Life, it is not good.... No.”
“Life is mighty confusing,” he said. “Why are you sad?”
“Because I am solitaire—and because there is so much miserable. Oui.... There is little happiness—only les petites minutes.... But all the time life is not well.”
The petites minutes!... The little minutes! There it was again, the same thought that Maude Knox had put into words. The little moments of happiness. Andree searched for them, too. She felt that the best life had to offer her were rare and transitory moments of joy.
“Pauvre petite!” he said, and took her hand. “You should be always glad. It isn’t right for you to be sad. You weren’t built to be sad.... It’s rotten.”
“Yes,” she said, pensively, not understanding all his words, but comprehending their meaning from his tone.
It filled him with anger to think of this child whom sorrow had no right to touch for years—to think of her life as clouded at the moment when it should have been filled with joys. It was unfair.... Life had no right to treat her so. Sympathy and tenderness moved him, and he placed his arm about her and drew her to him. She did not resist, nor did she respond, even when he turned her face upward and kissed her. Her lips were cold.... If nothing but little minutes of happiness were possible for her, he vowed in his heart that he would make them more numerous.
He continued to hold her, and she lay in his arms unresisting while he whispered to her as he would have whispered to an unhappy child—yet not as he would have whispered to a child. The touch of her, her nearness, her sweet fragility mounted to his head.
“I want you to be very happy ... because I love you,” he said, and, saying it, he believed it. There was room in his thoughts for nothing but her in that moment. Inhibitions were forgotten, apprehensions laid aside—the youth in his heart cried out to the youth in her heart—nothing remained but youth and love and a great sympathy. He did not look to the future. The sharp voice of conscience, suspicious, narrow, inherited from his mother, was silenced. Not that he was consciously running counter to the demands of that conscience! He was living that minute with no thought of what the next minute might bring....
Andree freed herself and looked at him gravely, with a sad scrutiny. “No,” she said. “You do not love me.... It is not possible.”