Then indeed a silence fell. Jacqueline, too petrified to embellish her statement, let her voice trail off into silence; Max, folding—mechanically folding—the strands of hair, offered neither disclaimer nor acceptance. With the force of the inevitable the confession had struck home, and deep within him was the strong soul's respect for the inevitable.
"You have always known?" he said, slowly, when the silence had fulfilled itself. "You have always known—that I am a woman?"
It sounded abominably crude, abominably banal—this tardy question, and never had Max felt less feminine than in the uttering of it.
The lips of Jacqueline quivered, her blue eyes brimmed with tears of distress.
"Oh, I could wish myself dead!"
"And why?"
"Because I have made myself an imbecile!"
The humiliation, the self-contempt were so candid, so human, that something changed in Max's face and the icy rigidity of pose relaxed.
"Come here!"
The guilty child to the life, Jacqueline came timidly across the room, the candlestick still drooping unhappily from her right hand, the mysterious mug clutched in her left.