“Can a mother speak like that?”
“Oh!” she replied, “I do not feel that I am the mother of children who never have been born; it is enough for me to be the mother of those that I have and to love them with all my heart. I am a woman of the civilized world, monsieur—we all are—and we are no longer, and we refuse to be, mere females to restock the earth.”
She got up, but he seized her hands. “Only one word, Gabrielle. Tell me the truth!”
“I have just told you. I never have dishonored you.”
He looked her full in the face, and how beautiful she was, with her gray eyes, like the cold sky. In her dark hair sparkled the diamond coronet, like a radiance. He suddenly felt, felt by a kind of intuition, that this grand creature was not merely a being destined to perpetuate the race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living statue that brightens our life.
Her husband remained standing before her, stupefied at his tardy and obscure discovery, confusedly hitting on the cause of his former jealousy and understanding it all very imperfectly, and at last he said: “I believe you, for I feel at this moment that you are not lying, and before I really thought that you were.”
She put out her hand to him: “We are friends then?”
He took her hand and kissed it and replied: “We are friends. Thank you, Gabrielle.”
Then he went out, still looking at her, and surprised that she was still so beautiful and feeling a strange emotion arising in him.