‘You really mean that you are tired of my presence?’ he said, with no sense of anything except the immense desolation which seemed suddenly to cover all his life.
‘You will put the dots on all your i’s!’ she said impatiently. ‘That kind of love of explanation is so English; all your political men’s time is wasted in it. Nobody in England understands à demi-mot, or appreciates the prettiness of a hint.’
‘I understand well enough—too well,’ he muttered, with a sigh that was choked in its birth. ‘But—but—I suppose I am a fool; I did not think you really cared much—yet I always fancied—I suppose I had no right—but surely we have been friends at the least?’
His knowledge of the world and of women ought to have stopped the question unuttered; but a great pain, an intense disappointment, had mastered him, and left him with no more tact or wisdom than if he had been a mere lad fresh from college. It cost him much to make his reproach so measured, his words so inoffensive. He began to understand why men had said that Nadine Napraxine was more perilous in her chastity and her spiritual cruelty than the most impassioned Alcina.
She looked at him with a little astonishment mingled with a greater offence.
‘Friends? certainly; why not?’ she said, with entire indifference. ‘Who is talking of enmity? In plain words, since you like them so much, you do—bore me just a little; you are too often here; you have a certain manner in society which might make gossips remark it. You do not seem to comprehend that one may see too much of the most agreeable person under the sun. It is, perhaps, a mistake ever to see much of anyone; at least, I think so. Briefly, I do not wish to have any more stories for Nice and its neighbourhood; this one of Boris Seliedoff is quite enough! They are beginning to give me a kind of reputation of being a tueuse d’hommes. It is so vulgar, that kind of thing. They are beginning to call me Marie Stuart; it is absurd, but I do not like that sort of absurdities. I had nothing to do with the folly of poor Boris, but no one will ever believe it; he will always be considered my victim. It is true you are certain not to kill yourself; Englishmen always kill a tiger or a pig if they are unhappy, never themselves. I am not afraid of your doing any kind of harm; you will only go home and see your farmers and please your family; and you will give big breakfasts in uncomfortable tents, and be toasted, and your county newspapers will have all sorts of amiable paragraphs about you, and sometime or other you will marry—why not? Please stand back a little and let me pass; we shall meet in Paris next year when you take a holiday on your reduced rents.’
She laughed a little, for the first time since Seliedoff’s suicide; her own words amused her. Those poor English gentlemen, who fancied they would stem the great salt tide of class hatred, the ever-heaving ocean of plebeian envy, by the little paper fence of a reduced rental! Poor Abels, deluding themselves with the idea that they could disarm the jealousy of their Cains with a silver penny!
But the thoughts of Geraldine were far away from any political ironies with which she might entertain her own discursive mind.
‘Nadine, Nadine,’ he said stupidly, ‘you cannot be so cruel. I have always obeyed you; I have never murmured; I have been like your dog; I have been content on so little. Other men would have rebelled, but I—I——’
Her languid eyes opened widely upon him in haughty surprise and rebuke.