Annette had not appeared all day, and Paul’s summons at her chamber-door had elicited no response. He and the Baroness had dined together and had talked in the way now grown customary to them, being neither more nor less affectionate towards each other than common, and they were now together in the public salon, and, as fate would have it, they were alone. The Baroness dropped something with a metallic sound upon the floor, and uttered a little cry of dismay.
‘Oh, my bracelet!’ she exclaimed; ‘my favourite, my precious bracelet! It is broken, and I would not have had anything happen to it for the world!’
Paul ran to lift it from the floor, and assured himself by examination that it was not broken. The hasp by which it was fastened had come open, whether as the result of accident or design may not be known. Ladies have ways of saving a platonic converse from mere dulness, and this may have been one of them, or may not. But Paul, having shown to demonstration that the ornament was undamaged, the Baroness held out a very prettily-rounded, plump, white arm, and Paul, trembling a little at the slight contact the task involved, proceeded rather clumsily to fix the bracelet in its place. He looked up, and the lady’s eyes were fixed upon his face with an expression of grave and serene tenderness. His own eyes were humid, and he looked back at her as an earth-bound soul might look towards paradise. And on a sudden, before a sound of warning had been heard by either of them, their two hands were struck violently apart, and Annette stood between them, her eyes flaming with rage and the spirit of temporary insanity last imported by the domestic smugglers.
CHAPTER XX
[Note: The print copy had a missing page here.]
‘No man knows the sex. Women are like Tennyson’s description of the law—a wilderness of single instances; but except for those surprising examples which are detected for us only by the talisman of a great love, there is a family likeness amongst them. The woman is the tougher-fibred creature, and there is excellent good reason why she should be so. She suffers as no man ever suffers, and she could not bear her pangs—she would go mad under them—if she were half as sensitive to suffering as the less-tried male; and on the moral side the lady is a pachyderm and the average workman an un-shelled polype in comparison. I invoke,’ he cried, striding the little grassy platform on which his feet had worn a pathway between his tent-door and the chattering runnel—‘I invoke the unnumbered squads and battalions and armies of shame which are known, and always have been known, to every town and city which has ever dared to call itself civilized since history began. From Lais in her jewelled litter to Cora in her English landau in the Bois, and on to the shabbiest small slut who flaunts her raddle and her broken feather in the slums of London, the same story is told and the same moral preached. Where is an equal army of men to be found to invite the contumely of their own sex? A woman’s virtue is her continence, and a man’s virtues are truthfulness and courage. There is an unspeakably great army of the one sex which makes a show and a lure of its penal uniform. Find me anywhere a band of men who flaunt themselves in an equal denial of the virtues proper to man, who parade themselves as cowards and liars, and strive to make a living by the parade of their own desertion from the manly principle. The tender sensibility of the generic woman is a fraud, and I should know that better than most men, because I so long believed in it and had so many rude awakenings from faith. But, oh I now and again—happy the man who learns it early!—there is a woman to be found so strong and delicate, so tender yet courageous, so much beyond the best that men ever find in men, that there is nothing for us but to abase our souls in gratitude and worship and wonder. We—we have genius of a hundred sorts, and still genius is rare; we invent, we construct, we drag new sciences, patient fact by fact, from the regions of darkness; we think great thoughts and speak great words—there is no limit set to the passion of our intellectual greed, no limit to the conquering march of eternal achievement; and when all is said and done there never lived a woman who had true genius for anything but love and goodness. There in that glorious small specialized field they shine, and they shine the brighter and more splendid because of their contrast with a sordid, heartless, stupid, and greedy sex. And there,’ he said, kneeling to stir the slumbering embers of his camp-fire—‘there, shining in that little shining field, are you, Madge, brightest amongst the brightest and saddest among the saddest, and here am I who wrecked your life for you with such admirable good intent’
The rage flamed out. He took his seat upon his camp-stool, and shredded tobacco for his pipe, staring with vacant eyes into the smoke-fog which everywhere imprisoned his gaze, and in a minute he was back at his dreams again, and the past once more unrolled itself before him.
He was back in Montcourtois, marching the cobbled pavement of the place in front of the Hotel of the Three Friends, hatless and just half conscious of the touch of the wintry air on his cheek. The Baroness was newly rankling under an insult now so many years of age; and Annette, clearly visible at moments between the slits of the Venetian blinds, was still pacing the lamplit salon. The whole thing happened in his mind again precisely as it had happened in fact so very long ago.
A sudden remembrance and a sudden impulse moved him almost in the same instant. When the bracelet had fallen from her arm, the Baroness had cried out to the effect that it was her most valued treasure, and Paul suddenly called to mind the fact that it still lay on the floor of the salon. Annette might observe it at any moment, and might choose to wreak her supposed offence upon it; and, thinking thus, he hastened back to the apartment, prepared for any storm that might assail him. But Annette, who, in the inexplicable changes of mood which affected her at such times as these, was marching gaily up and down the room singing ‘Tout le long de la route ‘to a swinging rhythm, chose to disregard him. He saw the precious ornament lying where it had fallen, possessed himself of it, and passed out at the further door. For any sign she gave Annette may not have seen him, and Paul had time, as he crossed the corridor to his study, to remark upon a form of alcoholism which allowed its victim unembarrassed speech in combination with a steady gait and an entire irresponsibility of thought. The manifestation was comparatively new to him, and he had spent some thought upon it It was so foreign to the popular idea of drunkenness that it accounted to him for his long-continued blindness to the truth.