“I can’t wait! I’m so unhappy! I want to hear his dear, kind voice!”
“Come in here and lie down beside me, darling. Talk to me!”
With that beloved head on her shoulder, Claudine grew calm and strong again. She would have listened to her all night. What did it matter if this were only a new caprice? It was a good one, a safe one.
She thought of her own life, of how her child had assuaged her bitterness and given her peace. She thought of the hopes she had relinquished—such little hopes compared with Andrée’s inordinate ambitions, and she believed that all that was to happen again. Andrée would be saved, if she would love her child better than herself. And she believed that this would happen. She looked very earnestly into her face; it was imperious, even cruel, but it was the cruelty of blindness, of one who inflicts suffering without knowing what suffering is.
She didn’t care in the least that Andrée’s brilliant future was endangered. She didn’t care how fettered and narrow her life might become. Better narrow and deep, she thought, than broad and shallow.
She listened quite unmoved to her child’s tears and sobs. It didn’t matter. She kissed her with a sublime sort of indifference. She had won; God had helped her, and she had won.
§ iii
Alfred came, promptly, the next morning, and Andrée received him alone.
“Al,” she said. “Can we make a new start?”
He didn’t look at her. When Claudine had telephoned so urgently for him to come, he had expected something of this sort.