"Passion," he told himself scornfully, "mere passion."
"She was the first ripe woman I ever touched, and I fell for her! That's all," he muttered. "But, how could I ever, ever, ever have done it?"
Heaping bitter self-reproaches, he took his bewildered head in his hands, while he wrestled with the humiliating chain of ruminations. Naturally enough, it was the memory of a speech of Marien's which afforded him his first clue.
"In what you have just been saying, you have given me a character," she had replied to one of his advances. "If I could play that part always, I should be what you are in love with, and you would love me always; but I cannot play it always; I can play it seldom. I play it now for an hour and then perhaps never again."
This speech, vexatiously enigmatic then, sounded suddenly rational now. It meant that he had unconsciously bestowed upon her his idealized conception of womanhood. This was made comparatively easy because in the plays Marien almost invariably enacted the heroines, always sweet, always gentle, and almost always good; or, if erring, they were more sinned against than sinning. Most of these piled-up virtues of her rôles John dotingly had ascribed to her, and his professional contacts afforded few glimpses of the real Marien by which his drawing could be corrected.
Atop of this had come those few hours of delicious intimacy in her apartment, when she had deliberately played the part she saw that he would like. This had sufficed to make his illusion complete.
Still John had no reproaches for the actress. Instead, he found within him a renascence of respect for her, particularly for her frankness. Most women—most men, too, for that matter, he thought—play the hypocrite with themselves and with others. He must do her full credit. She had not done so. She might have ruined him. He owed his escape to no discernment of his own. When he had not understood, she had resolutely played the scene out for him—to the uttermost. It must have cost a woman, any woman, something to do that, he reasoned. Under this interpretation, Marien was no longer repulsive to him. Instead, he found in her something to admire. Her courage was sublime. Her devotion to her god, ambition, if terrible, was also magnificent.
"Yet, why," he asked himself, "did she let me take her in my arms? Sympathy," he answered at last. "She never loved me. A woman who loved a man could not do what she did in the restaurant. She was very sorry for me, that was all. She let me kiss her as she would let a dog lick her hand." And then he remembered another speech of hers: "If a man is sometimes man, may not woman be also sometimes woman?"
This helped him finally and completely, as he thought, to understand; but it left him with a still deeper sense of his own weakness and humiliation.
Marien Dounay had roused the woman want in him and while she was near, her personality had been strong enough to center that want upon herself. But when she shook his passion free of her, it turned, after circling like a homing pigeon, due upon its course to Bessie. John saw that this was all logical and psychological. Patently, it was also biological.