Fate? What would it bring her? thought Cecile. But she could not pursue the thought: she seemed to herself to be dreaming of beautiful and subtle things which did not exist for other people, which only floated between them two. And those beautiful things were already there: it was no longer necessary to look upon them as illusions; it was as if she had overtaken the future! For one brief moment only did this happiness endure; then again she felt pain, because of his reverence.
3
He was gone and she was alone, waiting for the children. She neglected to ring for the lamp to be lighted; and the twilight of the late afternoon darkened into the room. She sat motionless, looking out before her at the leafless trees.
“Why should I not be happy?” she thought. “He is happy with me; he is himself with me only; he cannot be so among other people. Why then can I not be happy?”
She felt pain; her soul suffered and it seemed to her as if her soul were suffering for the first time, perhaps because now, for the first time, her soul had not been itself but another. It seemed to her as if another woman and not she had spoken to him, to Quaerts, just now. An exalted woman, a woman of illusions; the woman, in fact, whom he saw in her and not the woman that she was, a humble woman, a woman of love. Ah, she had had to restrain herself not to ask him:
“Why do you speak to me like that? Why do you raise up your beautiful thoughts to me? Why do you not rather let them drip down upon me? For see, I do not stand so high as you think; and see, I am at your feet and my eyes seek you above me.”
Ought she to have told him that he was deceiving himself? Ought she to have asked him:
“Why do I lower myself when I mix with other people? What do you see in me after all? Behold, I am only a woman, a woman of weakness and dreams; and I have come to love you, I don’t know why.”
Ought she to have opened his eyes and said to him: