"Only what?"
"I haven't the strength to."
"You must find the strength."
"I can't.... I ought to have it given me. I ought to have ... oh, nothing very much, perhaps ... a little gladness ... a glad memory ... the thought that my life will not have been entirely wasted.... The thought that I too shall have had my spell of love.... But that short spell I ask for ... I beg for it, I pray for it."
He blurted out:
"You will find it in marriage, Suzanne."
"No, no," she said, more bitterly, "only the man I love can give it to me.... I want, once at least, to feel a pair of arms around me, nothing but that, I assure you ... to lay my head on your shoulder and to remain like that, for an instant."
She was so near to Philippe that the muslin of her bodice touched his clothes and he breathed the scent of her hair. He felt a mad temptation to take her in his arms. And it would have been a very small thing, as she had said: one of those moments of happiness which one plucks like a flower and remembers.
She looked at him, not sadly now, nor resigned, but smiling, archly, with all the ingenious charm of the woman who is trying to conquer.