"The other two then. Suzanne has confided to you that she loves that brute?"
"But you knew it?"
"Oh, I guessed, I guessed; but till today like a fool I hoped against hope. Now it is over. She loves him. She cannot ever again love me, save in a puny second place. Second place! I do not want it. I will not have it, I despise it, I trample on it! Love is a game for two, Mademoiselle; a tragedy for three. There is only love in the world, and it can never ever be mine. I cannot love or be loved if there is another."
"But she is your sister! How can you love her as you are saying? You cannot have the true passion of love for your sister."
"But if I have it, and know I have it, what then? Listen: There is no woman in the history of the world who ever loved any man more than I love Suzanne. 'Cannot' so love her, indeed: but I do! Every book I have ever read, every notion that has ever come to me from external things tells me that love is a passion a woman should feel for a man only; I look into my heart and find it is not so. I do not explain, or defend, or even understand. I suppose God fashions us in different moulds, makes some of us to love one way and some another. Why not? And why should He, Who, as your Bible says, is Himself Love, why should He limit this chief thing in His universe to the one narrow relationship of man and woman? A woman can love her friend more purely, more nobly than ever any man can; and with the bond of blood in addition, her heart can hold a love more intimate, more tender than you will find in all the stories of the sexes. Am I mad to talk so? It is the truth. Do you understand? Do you see?"
I was slowly learning to accept as true for others emotions my heart could never feel, my mind with difficulty comprehend.
"I think I see. But how many other sisters are there who feel as you do? Does she?"
"Ah no! She has never cared, never conceived how I love her. She is careless, indifferent, does not come to me when I need her: an ordinary sister. Sometimes the contrast between her insouciance of what I have felt and my passionate love for her has maddened me. Yet indifference, coldness, I could have borne for ever, but not that she should love some one else. Ah, no, no, no! Oh, my little sister, thou art the only creature I have ever known to love, and thou hast killed me. God made me to be loveless. He decided this cruelty from the Beginning. I had to lose her. I keep saying over and over to myself: it had to be, it had to be—"
"Had it to be him?" I was crying, but had to stop her somehow.
"No," with sudden fury. "If she is to have a man, it shall be some one less vile than he. Have you any conception, Mademoiselle, of what this man is?"