“What have I done?” she asked herself, but she could find nothing in her own conduct to explain Richard’s behaviour. “If he regarded me with even the interest of a casual acquaintance he must have told me of his departure. He would have said something, surely. Even if he hates me he would have spoken of when he was going away.”
But Richard had not mentioned it, and had it not been for a chance remark of Mr. Sotheby’s she would have known nothing of the matter. “He must have intended to hide it from me,” she said, wondering why it should be hidden and asking herself if it was because he was afraid of telling her, or because he had fancied that she was in love with him.
“No, he has no such thoughts,” she assured herself. “It is because of his complete indifference to me. His whole mind is occupied by Ginette Grandison.” And suddenly, a new thought striking her, she said aloud and almost joyfully: “Who knows what unhappiness she may be causing him?” The thought of Richard’s pain was a comfort to her, and she wondered once more what the woman could be like who had so enslaved him.
“I seem sometimes in my thoughts to assume that I am in love with Richard myself,” she said to herself with surprise. “But indeed I don’t love him. He is hateful; when I am with him I know well enough that we could never by any chance love each other. He is as sharp as his own nose; he has no feelings that I can understand. But yet I am fond of him, for he is the first man to whom I have been able to speak freely, the first man. How I long to live in a world of such men. To live in Paris.”
Presently her thoughts turned from Richard and his cruel behaviour, to think of her own life and what it would become.
“I should have escaped from here by now had it not been for him,” she said bitterly, and then, recollecting that there had been no more answers to her advertisement, she wondered if she would ever have another opportunity. “If I have the courage to advertise again,” she added, for even that seemed doubtful to her at that hour.
“Damn the fellow,” she said at last. “He has disturbed my life to no purpose, he has raised a hundred questions he cannot answer; I should have been happier if I had never seen him.”
And it seemed to her that every fresh experience in life would always bring her such regrets; that all struggles were only destined to make her suffer, and that the best course perhaps was to go through life blindly, living from day to day, immersed in a world of dreams like her father, and like him shunning all contact with her fellow creatures. These thoughts were dreadful to her, for the afternoons she had passed sitting at the Burnt Farm talking to Richard Sotheby while he painted her were precious. “The happiest moments in my life,” she cried. “For I thought then that I had found a friend.”
Yet it was true: she would have been happier if she had never met him.
“I am not jealous,” she exclaimed. “I know he is in love with Ginette Grandison; I have always known it, and it has never given me a moment’s pang of jealousy. If only he had spoken of her, if he had told me he was going back to her, I should have felt happy for his sake. I should not have had a single selfish thought.