She sat still as any statue of a queen dethroned; the pale rose folds of the satin flowing about her feet, the ruin of pale rose leaves on the floor before her.
All her life she had laughed at the love of men and derided it, and starved it on graceful philosophies and ethereal conceits, and dismissed it with airy banter and disbelieved its truest words and its hardest pains: and now a love which she had lost escaped her, and she found no comfort either in her wit or in her scorn.
Certain of the words which he had said to her remained in persistent echo on her ear. Some sense that she had been cold to him and too capricious, and too negligent of what he felt, came to her. It might even be that he had sought the warmth of other affections because she had left his heart empty herself. He had always been a sentimentalist! Had she not called him Werther, Obermann, René, Rolla? He had wanted the impossible, the immutable, the eternal.
He had asked of love and of life what neither can give.
He had expected a moment of divinest rapture to be prolonged through a lifetime.
He had expected the song of the nightingale to thrill through the year. Senseless dreams and hopeless!—but had she been too cruel to them?
For a moment her conscience spoke, and her heart relented towards him. She remembered the many times when she had treated the warmth of his passion as an absurd delirium or an exaggerated sentiment, when she had again and again and again bidden him take his erratic rhapsodies elsewhere than to her.
If he had done so, was he so much to blame?
Almost she could have pardoned him. If only he had not lied to her she would have pardoned him.
'Good God, why could he not be honest?' she thought, with indignant scorn. 'Why could he not kneel at her feet, and lay his head upon her knee and own his folly? Men were weak always, and so easily misled whenever their senses ruled them, and such mere animals after all, even those in whom the mind was strongest!'