"That's exactly what I was going to say," said Hermione, her whole face lighting up. "I never expected to hear a counsel of cowardice from you, Emile."
"Or is it a counsel of prudence?"
He looked at them both steadily, feeling still as if he were face to face with children. For a man he was unusually intuitive, and to-night suddenly, and after he had begun to yield to his desire to be cruel, to say something that would cloud this dual happiness in which he had no share, he felt a strange, an almost prophetic conviction that out of the joy he now contemplated would be born the gaunt offspring, misery, of which he had just spoken. With the coming of this conviction, which he did not even try to explain to himself or to combat, came an abrupt change in his feelings. Bitterness gave place to an anxiety that was far more human, to a desire to afford some protection to these two people with whom he was sitting. But how? And against what? He did not know. His intuition stopped short when he strove to urge it on.
"Prudence," said Hermione. "You think it prudent to avoid the joy life throws at your feet?"
Abruptly provoked by his own limitations, angry, too, with his erratic mental departure from the realm of reason into the realm of fantasy—for so he called the debatable land over which intuition held sway—Artois hounded out his mood and turned upon himself.
"Don't listen to me," he said. "I am the professional analyst of life. As I sit over a sentence, examining, selecting, rejecting, replacing its words, so do I sit over the emotions of myself and others till I cease really to live, and could almost find it in my head to try to prevent them from living, too. Live, live—enter into the garden of paradise and never mind what comes after."
"I could not do anything else," said Hermione. "It is unnatural to me to look forward. The 'now' nearly always has complete possession of me."
"And I," said Artois, lightly, "am always trying to peer round the corner to see what is coming. And you, Monsieur Delarey?"
"I!" said Delarey.
He had not expected to be addressed just then, and for a moment looked confused.