"He sounds charming to live with."
"Ah, yes. That is it. He is charming. One cannot bear it. To have the five-finger exercises of his irresistibility played on one. To be the stiff piano on which he practises but never plays. It is too much. And one remembers the days when one was the concert grand. Pouf. It is not agreeable."
There was a pause. Maurice knew that she was going to say a great many other things.
But they had reached the Hotel Bungalow. Regretfully they parted.
He thought that she was a very remarkable woman indeed.
She thought how like her husband he was. Her husband twenty-five years ago.
At dinner she still was in black and white. Black covered with filmy laces, soft and shadowy and mysterious. After dinner they sat on the terrace and looked out at the inky relentless sea.
"Being sensible is no good at all," she said with sudden passion. "Courage is the only helpful virtue; when I married I was young and very pretty and I had thought about life a lot. I knew that in men fidelity had the importance that they gave to it. To a few—very few—it matters—but in most cases unfaithfulness is not a psychological thing at all; it is simply a temporary excess like getting drunk—squalid, if you like—but not touching your real relationships. Women bluff a lot on the subject and many are fools. They believe in the same law for both sexes. It is a ridiculous fallacy. Only Edmond was different. He loved women—psychologically. He was therefore inconstant, which is the real sin against marriage. He was a great lover, an artist. Every woman was to him what a canvas is to a painter, a violin to a violinist. The colours and the sounds he got were marvellous. Sometimes he would try impossible subjects—for fun—but always he could bring some sort of harmony out of everything. Ma foi, it amuses me to watch him now—now that it is difficult, and he is fifty-six and I don't love him—but then, when everything was easy and he was twenty-seven and I cared—then it was—well, it was different."
The way that her voice opened and shut reminded him of a sea anemone.
"It is not the way to talk to a stranger, is it?" she said abruptly, "but I feel as if I had known you for a long time. For twenty-five years, to be exact," she added.