"You are a stranger—to me," replies Xenia Sabaroff; and as she speaks she looks full at him.
He colors with discomfiture. "Because in the due course of nature I have succeeded to my father's title, you seem to consider that I have changed my whole identity," he says, with great irritation.
She is silent; she looks down on the white ostrich-feathers of her fan. He is vaguely encouraged by that silence. "Strangers! That is surely a very cold and cruel word between those who once were friends?"
The direct appeal to her makes her look up once more, with great hauteur in the coldness of her face.
"Sir, I think when people have forgotten that each other exist, it is as though they had never met. They are perhaps something more distant still than strangers, for to strangers friendship in the future is possible; but those who have been separated by oblivion on the one hand and by contempt on the other are parted as surely and eternally as though death had divided them."
Gervase gathers some solace from the very strength of the words. She would not, he thinks, feel so strongly unless she felt more than he allows: he gazes at her with feigned humility and unfeigned admiration and regret.
"If Madame Sabaroff," he murmurs, "can doubt her own powers of compelling remembrance, she is the one person on earth only who can do so."
She is stung to anger.
"I am really at loss to decide whether you are intentionally insolent or unintentionally insincere. You are possibly both."
"I am neither. I am only a man who passionately and uselessly rebels against his fate."