Othmar shrank a little from the words, as though they hurt him physically. They were true enough to be painful.
'Perhaps one knows their value too late,' he said, controlling with effort a strong impatience of her want of sympathy and her unkind and careless amusement at his expense.
'Or perhaps we imagine a value in them they never possessed,' she replied. 'That is far more probable. Distance lends enchantment to the view of them—at least it does with such temperaments as yours, which are always self-tormenting and given to idealising both things and people. When the persons are living, to ruffle and weary and contradict you, you only think what bores they are; but when they are dead you begin to idealise them, and sacrifice yourself to their manes in all kinds of self-censure. It is a very morbid way of taking life. I hope your son will not resemble you in that particular.'
'It is to be hoped, for his comfort, that he will rather resemble his mother in the art of immediate and complete oblivion of both the dead and the living,' said Othmar, with an irritation which was almost ill-temper, and a retort which passed the limits of courtesy.
He had never felt so strong an annoyance as he felt now at her ironical and slighting treatment of his thoughts and feelings; so great an impatience of that tranquil and contemptuous method of regarding life which never varied in her, and which would never vary, it seemed to him, even before his own dead body. Before it he felt that fatigue which human eyes feel when long in the radiance of electric light. He longed for simple sympathy, simple consolation, simple affection, as the tired eyes long for rest in cool shadows of dusky dewy eves in summer woods, and he was ill at ease with himself for what he concealed from her.
Yet, he thought, of what use would it be to tell her of that poor child at Les Hameaux? She would have no pity certainly, probably no patience, with what would seem to her the most absurdly romantic course of adventures. She would ridicule him as she ridiculed him now—if she believed him; and very likely she would not even do that.
She looked at him under the languid lids of her dreamy eyes: eyes so calm, so indifferent, so mysterious, so satirical in their survey of him as of all mankind.
'My dear friend,' she said, with a little contempt and a little rebuke in her tone, 'it seems to me that we are very nearly—quarrelling! Nothing is so vulgar as to quarrel. I have never done it in my life. It is a great waste of time; and nothing can be more bourgeois. I have never understood why people should quarrel; it is so very easy to walk away!'
Therewith she rose and walked towards the open doors, with that undulating movement of the hips and beautiful ease and grace of step for which she was renowned through Europe; no woman's walk was comparable to hers.