“It hurts me to say these harsh things to you,” he continued. “I would so much sooner encourage you in your sentiment. But to what end should I do so? You are a woman of deep and passionate feeling. You do not forget; you do not change; your little boy’s grave is to you what Bethlehem was to the Early Christians; Vanderlin is to you what Ulysses was to Penelope. You never seem to realize that this past to which you cling is a wholly dead thing, no more to be imbued again with the breath of life than the body of your poor child, or the marble which lies over him. It is intolerable that a woman as young, as lovely, as rich, as admired and as admirable as you are should pass your years in obscurity fettered to a pack of useless memories like a living person, to a corpse. I have told you so often; I shall never cease to tell you so. What do you expect? What do you hope? What do you desire?”
“Nothing.” The word was cold, incisive, harsh; he tortured her but she did not give any sign of pain except by the nervous gesture with which her fingers closed on the strings of pearls at her throat as if they were a collier de force which compressed and suffocated her.
“No one lives without desires or ends of some kind however absurd or unattainable they may be,” he said with truth. “I think you deceive yourself. I think that, without your being sensible of it, you brood so much over the past because you fancy vaguely that you will evolve some kind of future out of it, as necromancers used to stare into a crystal until they saw the future suggested on its surface. The crystal gave them nothing but what their own imagination supplied. So it is with you. Your imagination makes you see in Vanderlin a man who does not exist and never existed; and it also makes you fancy possible some kind of reconciliation or friendship which is as totally impossible as if you and he were both in your coffins.”
She had turned from the window and walked to and fro the room, unwilling that he should see the emotion which his blunt speech awakened in her. There was a certain truth in them which she could not wholly deny and of which she was ashamed.
“Do not let us speak of these things. It is useless,” she said with impatience. “You do not understand; you are a man; how can you comprehend all that there is ineffaceable, unforgetable, for a woman in four years of the tenderest and closest union? Nothing can destroy it for her. For a man it is a mere episode more or less agreeable, more or less tenacious in its hold on him; but to her——.”
She stopped abruptly: her companion looked at her with admiration and compassion mingled in equal parts, and he smiled slightly.
“My dear Olga! Once in a hundred years a woman is born who takes such a view as you do of love and life. They are dear to poets, and furnish the themes of the most moving dramas. But they are women who invariably end miserably, either in a cloister like Heloise, or in a tomb like Juliet, or simply and more prosaically with tubercles on their lungs at Hyères or the Canaries. You know the world, or you used to know it. You must be aware that there are millions of women who in your place would have consoled themselves long ago. I want you to see the unwisdom and the uselessness of such self-sacrifice. I want you to resume your place in the world. I want you to realize that life is like the earth: there is the winter, more or less long, no doubt, but afterward there is the spring. You know that poem of Sully Prudhomme, in which he imagines that all the plants agree to refrain from bearing flowers a whole year. But that year has never been seen in fact. The poem is wrong artistically and scientifically.”
“Of the earth, yes; but in the human soul there are many spots stricken with barrenness for ever.”
“But not at your age?”
“What has age to do with it?”