“It is always like it!” he muttered. “One climbs a little, and then the stings come.”
Madame entered the room, and took her place at the other end of the breakfast table. She leaned upon her stick as she walked, and her face seemed more than ever lined in the early morning sunlight. She wore a dress of some soft black material, unrelieved by any patch of color, against which her cheeks were almost ghastly in their pallor.
“The stings, Bertrand? What are they?” she asked, pouring herself out some coffee.
Saton shrugged his shoulders.
“Nothing that you would understand,” he answered coldly. “I mean that you would not understand its significance. Nothing, perhaps, that I ought not to be prepared for.”
She looked across the table at him with cold expressionless eyes. To see these two together in their moments of intimacy, no one would ever imagine that her love for this boy—he was nothing more when chance had thrown him in her way—had been the only real passion of her later days.
“You do not know,” she said, “what I understand or what I do not understand. Tell me what it is that worries you in that letter.”
He pushed it away from him impatiently.
“I asked a friend—a man named Chambers—to put me up for a club I wanted to join,” he said. “He promised to do his best. I have just received a letter advising me to withdraw. The committee would not elect me.”
“What club is it?” she asked.