Sitting over her coffee, she saw him again as he stood with the old mocking smile on his too red lips while she argued across the spaces of Wolff’s house in the Avenue du Bois. He stood, rocking a bit on his toes, with the easy grace which came of a supple strength, looking down at her out of the mocking gray eyes.
“But there is no one whom I want to marry,” he had said, “even if Sabine would divorce me.”
At which she had grown angry and retorted, “Women interest you. It would be easy enough....”
“It would be a nasty, unpleasant business. She is not a bad wife. I might do much worse. I am sorry that she can’t have more children, but that is none of my doing. I do not want to hurt her. I might not have another wife as satisfactory.”
To which Thérèse had replied, “She is unhappy. I know she is. She can’t stand indifference forever, even if she is a cold woman. Besides she’s in love with you. She can’t go on always living with you and yet not living with you. She’d be happier free ... to marry some one else.”
Then he had mocked her out of the depths of his own security. “Do you think love is such a simple thing that it can be turned on and off like water from a tap?” (She knew that love with him was just that ... something which could be turned on and off, like water from a tap.)
“Besides, it was you who wanted me to marry her. I had other ideas.”
“You mean Ellen Tolliver?” she asked. And then, “You would not have married her if you could have escaped it ... if you could have got her in any other way.”
But she saw that the look of mockery had faded a little at the sound of the girl’s name. (She was of course no longer a girl but a successful woman of thirty or more.)
“I don’t know ...” he had said, “I don’t know what I should have done. Only I fancy that if I had married her there would have been a great many little heirs running about.”