'When she found that I knew all, she could say nothing!' she thought. 'She will be an acquisition to the French stage. Her melodrama was so well acted that almost it deceived me. Why was it played?'
She could not see the motive. For the first time in her life the reasons for the actions which she watched escaped her.
And think as she would that the scene had been a melodrama, an invention, yet there were certain tones, certain words in it which haunted her with a persistent sense of their truth.
These had not been common entreaties, common reproaches, which Damaris had addressed to her; there had been an impersonal generosity, a noble simplicity, in them which lifted them out of the charge of sensational and dramatic affectation. There was an enigma in them which she could not solve. They were unselfish and founded on accurate knowledge; they were out of keeping in the mouth of a paid companion of a man's passing amourettes. It seemed wholly impossible to her that they could have been spoken truthfully, and yet if they were not true there was no sense in them.
Some pang of self-consciousness moved her own heart as she pondered on these passionate supplications to her to make the life which was spent beside hers happier—'happier!'—that one simple word which was so ill-fitted to the complex feelings, the capricious demands, and the hypercritical exigencies of such characters as theirs.
She had no doubt that her husband was the lover of this girl; the denial of the one had moved her no more than the denial of the other; all her knowledge of human nature told her that it must be so; but as she sat in solitude a certain remorse came to her, a certain sense that from her own unassailable height and dignity and rank she had stooped to strike a creature not only unworthy of her wrath, but unprotected by youth, by ignorance, and by the quixotic temerity which had made her thus bold.
She honoured courage. She could not refuse her respect to the courage of this child.
She could not class her with the common souls of earth.
'Why did I not let her alone at the first? She was so content and so safe on her island,' she thought, with that pang of conscience which others had tried in vain to arouse in her.
It had been a caprice light as the freak which makes a butterfly pause on one flower instead of another. But the fruits of it were bitter to her.