'No. I suppose not,' and, with one of his astonishing changes of mood, he took her arm and began to talk of the day when he had first met her in Picquart's studio, where everybody was gay and lively except they two, so that he talked to her, and seemed to have been talking for ever and had no idea of ever ceasing to do so. And then he told her how better than even talking to her was being silent with her, and how all kinds of ideas in him that had been too shy to appear in solitude or with others had come tumbling out like notes of music because of her.
'I've nearly forgotten,' he said, 'what being in love is like. This was at the farthest end of love from that, something entirely new, so new as to be altogether outside life. I have had to grope back into it again.'
'I liked you,' said she, 'because you were English.'
'Did you?' He was puzzled. 'I thought that was precisely what I am not.'
Neither could be angry for very long, and neither could be rancorous. The enchantment in which they lived would sometimes disappear for a space, when they would suffer, and he would tell himself that he was too old for the girl, or that he was not the kind of man who could live with a woman, or that she was seducing him from his work, while she would just sit numbed until the enchantment came again. Without it there were moments when he seemed just ridiculous with his masses of papers, and Mr Clott, and his fussy insistence on being a great artist.... It was a keen pleasure to her to bring him back suddenly to physical things like food and clothes and to care for him. Sometimes he would forget everything except food and clothes, and then she lived in a horror lest he should remain so and lose altogether the power of abstraction and concentration which made him so singular and forceful, and so near the man she most deeply knew him to be if only some power, some event, even some accident, could make him realise it and force him out of his imprisonment and almost entombment in his own thoughts.
Her will concentrated on him anew and she said to herself, 'I can do it. I can do it. I know I can, and I will.' And when she was in these fierce passions she used to remember her grandfather, the kindly old bibliophile, looking anxiously at her and saying,—
'My dear, when you want a thing just look round and see if there aren't one or two other things you want.'
But she had never understood what he meant, and she had never been able to look round, for always there was one thing she wanted, and when she wanted it she could not help herself, but had to sacrifice everything, friends, possessions, even love. And as time went on, she realised that it was not Charles she wanted so much as some submerged quality in him. The object of her desire being simplified, her will set, only the more firmly, even rigidly.
It made her analyse him ruthlessly; his childish lack of self-criticism, his placidity, his insatiable vanity, his almost deliberate exploitation of his personal charm, all these things she cast aside and ignored. She came then to his thoughts, and here she was baffled because she knew so little of his history. Beyond his thoughts lay that in which she was passionately interested, but between her and it danced innumerable Charleses all inviting her attention, all bidding her look away from that one Charles Mann for whom she hungered with something of the worship which religious women have for their Saviour.
He was immensely kind to her, almost oppressively kind. He could never be otherwise to any living creature—in personal contact, but without that he was careless, indifferent, forgetful, although when she saw him again it was as though he had never been away. They were considered a charming and most devoted couple, and their domestic felicity helped him in his success.