“Love you?” I cried, choking with inarticulate rage. I tried to continue but I could not. I felt that if I remained another minute in her presence I did not know what I might do. “The end—thank God! The end!”
I flung up my arms, with a horrible laugh, and bolted for the door. But as I went I heard her clap her hands, as a delighted child might have done, and her voice came to me:
“David—you will come back.”
* * * * *
And back I returned, to delude myself, once more, with her sudden melting repentance, to listen to her self-accusation, to believe that all she had done wickedly and consciously had been only the instinct of a jealous woman to know how completely she was loved. Not a delectable page in my life. I set it down as it happened, without extenuation. Yet, two days later, I was free of her, forever! She lied to me and I caught her in the lie.
* * * * *
We were to have dined together and to have gone to the theater, but she had written me the day before that she would be forced to leave town. This had often happened and this postponement did not in the least excite my suspicion. A young Frenchman, the Comte Maurice Plessis de Saint Omer, one of my intimate friends, happened to drop in on me, and agreeing to dine together, we set out for Foyot’s, near the Luxemburg, bent on an epicurean dinner and a quiet evening.
Maurice de Saint Omer, in the pleasure-seeking crowd in which we moved, had the reputation of being a great dandy and my natural attraction towards him was considerably enhanced by the compliment to my vanity. He came of one of the great families of France which named its ancestors before the Crusades (his father was the Duc de Saint Omer and the château is the famous one near the Lorraine border). While he lived the life of a thorough man of the world, as it was understood in the Paris before the war, he brought to all relations of life dignity and distinction. He was neither rake nor profligate. Straight, tawny-haired, nose high-bridged and sensitively chiseled, blue-eyed and soft of voice, almost too elegant for our American ideal, his courage and tact had made him one of the arbiters on the field of honor. Why he should have taken to me, I do not know, but he did, and he occasionally favored me with his confidences. My own entanglement with Madame de Tinquerville was known to him. In fact, for months all his influence had been exerted to show me the quicksands into which I was sinking. We were talking of her as we neared the restaurant.
“And La Belle Tinquerville?”
“I was to have dined with her to-night but she was called to St. Germain.”