Blanche de Laon stared on her with hard unsympathetic sceptical eyes; she laughed a little, coarsely, rudely.
'Dame! You have a mind to show me you can act! If you were on the boards now you would bring down the house. You are no simpleton I see. No doubt you know the rôle which pays you best. I spoke to you in sincerity, and you answer me with a tissue of untruths. C'est bien du midi ça!'
Damaris looked at her wearily: the pain in her was too great for anger to have any place in it.
'You can believe what you like,' she said with effort. 'Go!'
Blanche de Laon, who had never in her life known any impulse of submission or any sense of fear, was vaguely awed and touched into involuntary acquiescence. Her swift, ready, insolent, and cruel tongue was silent.
She was baffled and angered. She had spoken so frankly and so cynically, because she had been certain that her words would fall on a willing ear, and be received by a mind open and ready for them. The possibility that Damaris might refuse to hearken to them had never presented itself to her. She had made the usual mistake of an ignoble mind. The possibility of a mind being noble had never suggested itself to her.
She was sure that Othmar was the lover of this child, and that the girl denied it to save him from all comment of the world, and all jealousy of his wife.
Such a denial was stupid and exaggerated, and unwise, because the force of all women lies in their power to make themselves feared, and in their unblushing employment and proclamation of their triumphs: still it was fine, even Blanche de Laon felt that. She did not for a moment believe the answer given her, and she was bitterly incensed at the rejection of all her overtures and the failure of all her counsels; but she was moved despite herself to a certain unwilling admiration of so much courage and of so much loyalty. It was a lie she felt sure; but there were a grandeur and utter oblivion of self in such a lie which impressed her by their utter unlikeness to herself.
She looked at the averted face of Damaris; then gathered up her gloves and whip, and without any other words went from the chamber.
'May I not go back to make my adieux?' asked Loswa, who waited for her in the courtyard of the house.