‘Well, then, recount to me the whole matter.’
‘Oh! there is nothing worth the telling, but they would make dædal pleasantries—pleasantries one fails to understand, except one have a clue—and they would talk about people with whom I was not acquainted.... Oh! it seems past human compassing to make friends with a person except one has known them all one’s life! How could I utter my conceit if they would converse of matters I did not understand?’ she repeated furiously. Jacques smiled.
‘I admit,’ he said dryly, ‘to be show man of a troupe of marionettes is an agreeable profession.’ She looked at him suspiciously for a second, and then catching his hands, cried desperately:—
‘Is it beyond our powers ever to make a new friend?’
‘That it is not, but it can’t be effected at once. I am sure that those Messieurs de Port-Royal would tell you that even Jesus Christ finds ’tis but a slow business worming His way into a person’s heart. There He stands, knocking and knocking, and then——’ Madeleine saw that he was on the point of becoming profane, and as her gods did not like profanity, she crossed herself and cut in with:—
‘But even admitting one can’t come to any degree of intimacy with a person at once, the beginning of the intimacy must happen at once, and I’m at a loss to know how the beginning can happen at once any more than the whole thing.’
She had got into one of her tight knots of nerves, when she craved to be reasoned with, if only for the satisfaction of confounding the reasons offered her. Jacques clasped his head and laughed.
‘You put me in mind of the philosophy class and old Zeno! It’s this way, two people meet, nothing takes place perhaps. They meet again, and one gives a little look, it may be, that sets the bells of the other’s memory pleasantly ringing, or says some little thing that tickles the humours of the other, and thus a current is set up between them ... a fluid, which gradually reaches the heart and solidifies into friendship.’
‘But then, there might never be the “little look,” or the “little word,” and then ... there would be no friendship’ (she crossed herself) ‘ ... it all seems at the mercy of Chance.’