“The secret that you do not love me,” said Juliette, in her little wise, even voice; “that you have never loved me. Ah! You think we do not know. You think that I am too young. But we are never too young to know that, to know all about it. I think we know it in our cradles.”
She spoke with a strange philosophy, far beyond her years. It might have been Madame de Chantonnay who spoke, with all that lady’s vast experience of life and without any of her folly.
“You think I am pretty. Perhaps I am. Just pretty enough to enable you to pretend, and you have pretended very well at times. You are good at pretending, one must conclude. Oh! I bear no ill-will ...”
She broke off and looked at him, with a gay laugh, in which there was certainly no note of ill-will to be detected.
“But it is as well,” she went on, “as you say, that we should understand each other. Thank you for telling me your secret—the one you have told me. I am flattered at that mark of your confidence. A woman is always glad to be told a secret, and immediately begins to anticipate the pleasure she will take in telling it to others, in confidence.”
She looked up for a moment from her work; for Loo had given a short laugh. She looked, to satisfy herself that it was not the ungenerous laugh that nine men out of ten would have cast at her; and it was not. For Loo was looking at her with frank amusement.
“Oh, yes,” she said; “I know that, too. It is one of the items not included in a convent education. It is unnecessary to teach us such things as that. We know them before we go in. Your secret is safe enough with me, however—the one you have told me. That is the least I can promise in return for your confidence. As to the other secret, bon Dieu! we will pretend I do not know it, if you like. At all events, you can vow that you never told me, if—if ever you are called upon to do so.”
She paused for a moment to finish off a thread. Then, when she reached out her hand for the reel, she glanced at him with a smile, not unkind.
“So you need not pretend any more, monsieur,” she said, seeing that Barebone was wise enough to keep silence. “I do not know who you are, mon ami,” she went on, in a little burst of confidence; “and, as I told you just now, I do not care. And, as to that other matter, there is no ill-will. I only permit myself to wonder, sometimes, if she is pretty. That is feminine, I suppose. One can be feminine quite young, you understand.”
She looked at him with unfathomable eyes and a little smile, such as men never forget once they have seen it.