His heart was heavy, and a personal offence was in him against her as he remembered her words.
What plainer hint could she have given him to pass his time and take his caresses elsewhere?
All alone though he was, his cheek grew red with anger and mortification.
'What does it matter to her what I do?' he thought bitterly, with a sense of mortification. 'I must be the vainest fool if I can flatter myself that, had I a hundred mistresses she would be ever jealous of any one of them. Men are feeble creatures, and coarse, and what they do matters nothing to her. So long as I do not cross her threshold unbidden, or ruffle a rose-leaf beneath her, what does she care what I do?'
As she herself passed behind her black Ukraine horses through the streets, a certain vague annoyance came over her, remembering his manner and his words.
He had never before been irritable as he was now. The evenness of his temper had been perfect, and had allowed her so great a latitude in the indulgence of her satire upon him, that she had been led to think him weaker than he was. It was only of late that he had answered her with a touch of bitterness, had hinted his impatience of her criticisms, and had shown that fatigue before their manner of life which he did not now affect to conceal.
'If we go on like this,' she thought, 'we shall become like everybody else; we shall not subside into friendship, but only into dissension, and the world will end in observing our dissensions, which will annoy me, his whole temper is so utterly unphilosophic. He cannot understand and accept the inevitable. He would have liked me to go and live in the centre of Asia Minor and adore him: I refused to do it when it would have been interesting to do. Good heavens! Why should I do it now, when I know every line of his face and every turn of his character as one knows the very stones on a road one takes daily?'
She had been wearied by his romantic ideas and by his unpractical aspirations, which suggested to her only more ennui than the world, stupid as it was, afforded her already. Yet she was irritated by her own latent consciousness that she should not care to know that his dreams went elsewhere.
'Comme cette fille lui trotte dans la tête!' she said, half aloud, with surprise and irritation. Her knowledge of men told her that remembrance with them usually means attraction, that irritation usually means some secret consciousness, some unspoken interest.
Languidly she recalled from the depths of her own memory the trivial, long-forgotten incident of Damaris Bérarde, whose features the sketch by Loswa had preserved from oblivion. She remembered how absurdly chivalrous Othmar had been that evening, how coldly and sharply he had rebuked herself for her negligence towards the child.