“And you—what do you think?”
“I? Oh, for me, I can’t generalize about it. I have no ideas on the subject.”
“I see.”
She was silent a while. I watched her clever thumbs pressing and smoothing the soft clay. She was no sculptor, but the head she was modelling had a mischievous ugliness. Though badly done, it expressed something. Watching her I realized again her immense capability, her command of herself, her understanding of the elements of life. What was she thinking of now, her sensitive witty face blinking sleepily with half-closed eyes like a cat’s? Inwardly I felt that she was faintly smiling at some pleasant memory or prospect. She was neither young nor beautiful. Her wiry little person suggested nothing voluptuous or alluring. She was dry and spare and untidy, yet her success with men was unequalled. Impossible to imagine her in an attitude of amorous tenderness, yet men adored her. And her lovers remained her friends. She puzzled me. There was something here that I would never understand. The high game of sex as a life occupation of absorbing interest and endless ramifications, a gallant and dangerous sport at which one became a recognized expert, in some such way I felt that she looked at it. As an Englishwoman gives herself up to hunting, I reflected, and exults in knowing herself to be a hard rider, just so Clémentine would go at the biggest jumps, keep in the first field. Riding to hounds or playing the daring game of love, the same sporting mentality, the same ecstatic sense of life, all our faculties sharpened by danger. Why not? Clémentine was sane, healthy, full of zest and delight. Impossible to think of her in terms of maudlin sentimentality or sordid secret pleasures. And yet for myself, I felt a loathing of men, a disgust at the vaguest image of the contacts of sex. It was very puzzling. There must be some deep racial difference between us, or some tenacious effect of my upbringing that held me in a vice, or was it only that Philibert had poisoned for me the sources of all emotion?
I moved about the dirty studio, brought back my mind to the subject I had come to discuss. “We have forgotten about Claire, haven’t we?”
“Well, yes, what of Claire?” She yawned.
“Philibert says that Ludovic could arrange it.”
“No doubt he could. The President of the Council is you know his greatest friend.”
“Yes, I know, but surely giving away secretaryships—”
“Oh, la la! Why not? Don’t worry about that. Madame de Joigny’s son-in-law will make quite a respectable under-secretary as far as that goes. I only wonder he’s not got what he wanted long ago.”