Boris winced. Usually a woman makes a confession so humiliating to vanity, only to one whom, however she may trust and like him, she yet has not the slightest desire to attract. Then he remembered that it might have a different significance, coming from her, with her pride so large and so free from petty vanity that the simple truth about a personal defeat gave her no sense of humiliation.
"I don't know what to do next," she continued, thinking aloud. "I seem to have no desire to go on, and, if I had, there doesn't seem to be any path to go on upon. You say I care for him. I don't know. I only know I seem to have needed him—his friendship—or, rather, my friendship for him."
Boris smiled cynically. But her words impressed him. True friendship was, as a rule, impossible between women and men; but every rule has exceptions, and this woman was in so many other ways an exception to all the rules that it might be just possible she had not fallen in love with Armstrong's strength of body and of feature and of will. At any rate, here was a wound, and a wound that was opportunity. The sorer the heart, the more eagerly it accepts any medicine that offers. So Boris suggested, with no apparent guile in his sympathy, "Why not go abroad for a year—two years? We can work there, and perhaps—I can help you to forget." Her expression made him hasten to add, "Oh, I understand. I'm merely the artist to you."
"Merely the artist! It's because you are 'merely the artist' that I could not look on you as just a man."
Boris's smile was sardonic. "The women the men respect too highly to love! The men the women revere too deeply for passion! Poor wretches." The smile was still upon his lips as he added, "Poor, lonely wretches!" But in his eyes she saw a pain that made her own pain throb in sympathy.
"We are, all, alone—always," said she. "But only those like you are great enough to realize it. I can deceive myself at times. I can dream of perfect companionship—or the possibility of it."
"But not with me?"
"I don't trust you—in that way," she replied. "I estimate your fancy for me at its true value. You see, I know a good deal of your history, and that has helped me to take you—not too seriously as a lover."
"How you have misread!" said he, and no one could have been sure whether he was in earnest or not under the manner he wore to aid him in avoiding what he called the colossal stupidity of taking oneself solemnly. "I'm astonished at your not appreciating that a man who lives in and upon his imagination can't be like your sober, calculating, bourgeois friends who deal in the tangible only. Besides, since I've had you as a standard, my imagination has been unable to cheat me. I've even begun to fear I'll never be able to put you far enough into the background to become interested again."
As he thus brought sharply into view the line of cleavage between their conceptions of the relations of men and women, she drew back coldly. "I don't understand your ideas there," said she, "and I don't like them. Anyone who lives on your theory fritters away his emotions."