She smiled at that and let him quiet her. When he reminded her that this was to be their farewell she was quieted altogether. She sat on a sofa, the only light, that of a distant lamp, softly enveloping her bare shoulders and warm neck; and she allowed him to sit beside her there.
The room was small and panelled in white, with empty sconces along the walls and parquet floor covered with oriental rugs. The door was half hidden in shadow. Both felt that in this stage they were about to say good-bye forever.
Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love for the first and last time in his life; and because animal passion had asserted itself in Paris, and because that passion seemed to be the characteristic of those butterfly affairs that had preceded this love for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether. This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not have with the sanction of holy authority he would not now attempt at all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one might kneel at the shrine of some virginal goddess before starting upon a lifelong journey into the countries where that goddess is unknown.
They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion.
"If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now think of as so right might end by being very wrong."
"Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be right."
"Not the ruin of our lives?"
"When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your husband's——"
"Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is good and kind and brave; but somehow—I don't know why: I don't know why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did love him."
"Nevertheless, you are married to him."