"Don't I?" he asked; "why not?"
"How could you think I'd go out on your last night here?" she answered.
"You won't go? ... Oh, Mrs. Adaile!"
And as they moved away under the horse-chestnut blossom, it was less dreadful to him that he was going to leave her.
Why did she do it? It could not have been to test her power over him; it could not have been to wound him wantonly. Who shall say why she did it! A woman is often unable to define her motive to herself. Two men came into the hotel after dinner—acquaintances both—and she became engrossed by them, and sent up little peals of laughter, and seemed to like their admiration, which was presumptuously barefaced. He sat tongue-tied in a corner, unwittingly providing equal entertainment for other women in the room. Though she knew he was suffering, she threw no glance to him. And that evening the boy entered on another stage—the stage of jealousy.
The fires of jealousy are always horrible, and there is none they ravage more fiercely than the lad whose torture the world finds comic. There is none, because no man, nor woman, nor young girl in such a pass, is so totally defenceless as a lad; to none other than a lad, when his love is outraged, does nature forbid even the resource of simulated dignity. His torments are intensified by the knowledge of his ineptitude. Always present is the thought that he ought to adopt an attitude which he is too raw to discover, and he is prostrated in perceiving that beside his glib rival he looks ridiculous and a lout.
After a clock had struck many times, "She makes herself too cheap," Mrs. Van Buren said sotto voce, and Madame de Lavardens assented by a grimace. The boy overheard, and got up, and wandered away. A new misery tightened his throat, and burned behind his eyeballs. She had been disdained! his world rocked. He was degraded, vicariously—for her sake, degraded that his Ideal should afford these people the opportunity to disparage her. Resentment beat in him; he longed to vindicate, to lay down his life for her—and knew himself a cipher, and that the tempest in his soul would be thought absurd. Disdained! It was paramount, bitterest. The humiliation of neglect dwindled; all his pain, all his consciousness was the hurricane of humiliation that he felt for her.
"If you weren't so young I should think you were trying to insult me, Conrad. Please don't speak to me any more," she said next morning, when he had made tactless, seventeen-year-old reproaches to her.
Her voice and gaze were cold, as if he were a stranger. She rose and left him. The grace of the slender figure had no mercy in it as he watched. The sun was streaming, and the birds chirped loud, and he thought his heart was broken as he watched. He sat looking the way that she had gone for long after the terrace was bare. And heavy hours passed emptily, and he was still bereft. And it was his last day here.
Half of it was lost when wretchedness waylaid her at a door. "I'm sorry," he gulped. She bent her head, and moved by him without speaking. In the group about the tea-table she was no gentler. The glare of sunshine mellowed. His father claimed him, and talked with unusual earnestness of ambition and of life; his mother wrapt his arm about her waist, and was pathetic and confident by turn. In the chatter of the salon he heard that Mrs. Adaile was going to the dance. From herself he had still no word or look. The flush in the sky faded. A relentless star peered forth. And it was his last day here.