A fresh silence fell upon them. Everything seemed to emphasise their seclusion—from the noises in the Cour du Carrousel that came to them in a dull murmur through the two high windows to the dim light in the room itself. But this seclusion, instead of encouraging the poet to declare his passion, only increased his distress. He said to himself, 'How pretty she is, and how sweet! She will go, and I shall never see her again. How stupid she must think me!—I feel quite paralysed near her and incapable of speech.' 'I shall never have a better opportunity,' thought Suzanne.
'You are very sad,' she said aloud, bestowing upon him a look of affectionate and almost sisterly sympathy. 'I noticed it as soon as I arrived,' she continued, 'but you do not trust me sufficiently to tell me your troubles.'
'No,' replied René, 'I am not sad. Why should I be? I have everything that can make me happy.'
She looked at him again with an expression of surprise and mute interrogation that seemed to say, 'Tell me what you have to make you happy?' René thought he saw that question in her eyes, but dared not understand it so. He sincerely believed himself to be so inferior to this woman that he had not the courage to disclose to her the depths of his devotion. All Suzanne's delightful confidence, in which he could not possibly detect any cold calculation, would be destroyed the moment he spoke, and he therefore went on as if his words referred to the general circumstances of life.
'Claude Larcher often tells me that I shall never be happier at any period of my literary career. He maintains that there are four stages in a writer's life—when he is unknown, when he is applauded by those who wish to spite his elders, when he is maligned because he is successful, and when he is forgiven because he is forgotten. I am so sorry you don't know him better—I am sure you would like him. Literature is his religion!'
'He is rather too artless, after all,' thought Suzanne, but she was too interested in the result of this interview to give way to her impatience. She seized upon the words René had just uttered and interrupted his uncalled-for praises of Claude by saying, 'His religion! It is true, that is just like you writers. I have a friend who is undergoing the ordeal, and she is always telling me that a woman ought to be careful not to bestow her affections upon an artist. He will never love her as much as he loves his art.'
She repeated these supposititious words of her imaginary friend with a look of pain upon her face; her cherry lips were parted by a half-stifled sigh that hinted at heartrending confidences and a presentiment of similar experiences in store for herself.
'Why, it is you who are sad,' observed René, struck by the sudden change in her pretty face.
'Now for it!' she thought, and then replied, 'That doesn't matter. What difference can it make to you whether I am sad or not?'
'Do you think that I take no interest in you?' rejoined René.