She was sitting on a low chair, and Newman was on an ottoman, near her. He leaned a little and took her hand, which for an instant she let him keep. “That means that I have not waited for nothing,” he said. She looked at him for a moment, and he saw her eyes fill with tears. “With me,” he went on, “you will be as safe—as safe”—and even in his ardor he hesitated a moment for a comparison—“as safe,” he said, with a kind of simple solemnity, “as in your father’s arms.”
Still she looked at him and her tears increased. Then, abruptly, she buried her face on the cushioned arm of the sofa beside her chair, and broke into noiseless sobs. “I am weak—I am weak,” he heard her say.
“All the more reason why you should give yourself up to me,” he answered. “Why are you troubled? There is nothing but happiness. Is that so hard to believe?”
“To you everything seems so simple,” she said, raising her head. “But things are not so. I like you extremely. I liked you six months ago, and now I am sure of it, as you say you are sure. But it is not easy, simply for that, to decide to marry you. There are a great many things to think about.”
“There ought to be only one thing to think about—that we love each other,” said Newman. And as she remained silent he quickly added, “Very good, if you can’t accept that, don’t tell me so.”
“I should be very glad to think of nothing,” she said at last; “not to think at all; only to shut both my eyes and give myself up. But I can’t. I’m cold, I’m old, I’m a coward; I never supposed I should marry again, and it seems to me very strange I should ever have listened to you. When I used to think, as a girl, of what I should do if I were to marry freely, by my own choice, I thought of a very different man from you.”
“That’s nothing against me,” said Newman with an immense smile; “your taste was not formed.”
His smile made Madame de Cintré smile. “Have you formed it?” she asked. And then she said, in a different tone, “Where do you wish to live?”
“Anywhere in the wide world you like. We can easily settle that.”
“I don’t know why I ask you,” she presently continued. “I care very little. I think if I were to marry you I could live almost anywhere. You have some false ideas about me; you think that I need a great many things—that I must have a brilliant, worldly life. I am sure you are prepared to take a great deal of trouble to give me such things. But that is very arbitrary; I have done nothing to prove that.” She paused again, looking at him, and her mingled sound and silence were so sweet to him that he had no wish to hurry her, any more than he would have had a wish to hurry a golden sunrise. “Your being so different, which at first seemed a difficulty, a trouble, began one day to seem to me a pleasure, a great pleasure. I was glad you were different. And yet if I had said so, no one would have understood me; I don’t mean simply to my family.”