Then he paused; long habit of reserve, a sensitive fear of wounding and of being wounded, the tenderness of pity for a blameless creature who adored him and who, if he spoke his thoughts aloud, would never lie in peace upon his heart again, all checked the words which had risen to his lips.
He sighed, kissed her hand, and murmured some vague caressing phrase. The moment passed; the impulse of confidence and candour lost strength and courage. ‘It would be cruel,’ he thought. ‘Since I have made my burden, let me at least have courage to bear it alone.’
It seemed to him unmanly and ungenerous to lay any share or shadow of it on this young life, which owed all its peace and light to ignorance of the truth. She was deluded, but she was happy: he let her be. He shrank from arousing her; he shrank from hurting her; she was like a child, doomed to starve on her awaking, but whilst she slept, dreaming, with a smile, that she was fed by bread from heaven.
CHAPTER XLI.
The Paris season seemed to all her world to have gained new brilliancy with the advent of the Princess Napraxine. The opening of that most desired and exclusive of all houses was an event of supreme import in the hierarchy of society, and she herself had returned from her self-inflicted exile in the North more disposed than usual for its frivolities and graces, more willing than usual to deign to see and be seen, more general in her courtesies, more amiable and benignant in her condescensions. When she chose, she could fascinate women scarcely less completely than she did men, and she did so choose this year of her reappearance from Russia. She was less capricious, less inexorably exclusive, less merciless in her ironies; those who knew her nature best concluded that something had pleased her; no one knew what. She, who had no secrets from herself as sillier people have, confessed frankly to herself that what pleased her was what her fine penetration had discovered at a glance, the first moment that she had entered the Hôtel d’Othmar.
‘All the virtues are there, no doubt,’ she had said to herself, ‘and all the qualities and all the charms, but Love—où va-t-il se nicher?’
Love, she saw, was absent.
She had a curious sentiment towards the young mistress of that gorgeous house. She admired her; she thought her type pure and lofty, her manners most high bred, if a little too constrained, her face lovely; she had a sort of pitying regard for her; the glance of the girl’s eyes moved her to compassion as those of an antelope will do the hunter, who nevertheless plunges his knife into its velvet throat; but she was not more dissuaded by her pity than the hunter is by his to desist from her intentions.