“Are you often unhappy?” asked Cecile.
“Always,” he replied, almost humbly and as though embarrassed at having to confess it. “I don’t know why, but it has always been so. And yet from my childhood I have enjoyed much that people call happiness. But yet, yet ... I suffer through myself. It is I who do myself the most hurt. And after that the world ... and I have always to hide myself. To the world, to people generally I only show the individual who rides and fences and hunts, who goes into society and is very dangerous to young married women....”
He laughed with his bad, low laugh, looking aslant into her eyes; she remained calmly gazing at him.
“Beyond that I give them nothing. I hate them; I have nothing in common with them, thank God!”
“You are too proud,” said Cecile. “Each of those people has his own sorrow, just as you have: the one suffers a little more subtly, the other a little more coarsely; but they all suffer. And in that they all resemble yourself.”
“Each taken by himself, perhaps. But that is not how I take them: I take them in the lump and therefore I hate them. Don’t you?”
“No,” she said calmly. “I don’t believe that I am capable of hating.”
“You are very strong within yourself. You suffice unto yourself.”
“No, no, not that, really not; but you ... you are unjust towards the world.”
“Possibly; but why does it always give me pain? Alone with you, I forget that it exists, the outside world. Do you understand now why I was so sorry to see you at Mrs. Hoze’s? You seemed to me to have lowered yourself. And it was because ... because of that special quality which I saw in you that I did not seek your acquaintance earlier. The acquaintance was fatally bound to come; and so I waited....”