“She couldn’t do it from inclination,” some one of them said at last. “There must have been something terrible.”
Then it was that Ludovic startled us. He spoke slowly as if to himself.
“She was only beginning to learn how little conduct has to do with life. For others she had come to understand that what one does has little or no relation to what one is. I am convinced that she, poor child, is persuaded that she has committed some dreadful crime.”
But it was Clémentine who said the last word that I carried away with me.
“If she hadn’t married into your family,” she said, glaring out at me from the door of her taxi, “she would have been all right. Why, she should have chosen Philibert—”
“But, chérie amie, she didn’t. It was her mother who did it all.”
“Rubbish! She loved him. She loves him still.”