"It's very possible," he replied. "But—I can say it to you—I have a certain gift of—shall I call it divination?—where men and women are concerned. It is not merely that I am observant of what is, but that I can often instinctively feel that which must be inevitably produced by what is. Very few people can read the future in the present. I often can, almost as clearly as I can read the present. Even pessimism, accentuated by the influence of the Infernal City, may contain some grains of truth."
"What do you see for us, Emile? Don't you think we shall be happy together, then? Don't you think that we are suited to be happy together?"
When she asked Artois this direct question he was suddenly aware of a vagueness brooding in his mind, and knew that he had no definite answer to make.
"I see nothing," he said, abruptly. "I know nothing. It may be London. It may be my own egoism."
And then he suddenly explained himself to Hermione with the extraordinary frankness of which he was only capable when he was with her, or was writing to her.
"I am the dog in the manger," he concluded. "Don't let my growling distress you. Your happiness has made me envious."
"I'll never believe it," she exclaimed. "You are too good a friend and too great a man for that. Why can't you be happy, too? Why can't you find some one?"
"Married life wouldn't suit me. I dislike loneliness yet I couldn't do without it. In it I find my liberty as an artist."
"Sometimes I think it must be a curse to be an artist, and yet I have often longed to be one."
"Why have you never tried to be one?"