“Really? Well, then, you can wander through it.”
“I do not wish to see it alone.”
“Larbi shall guide you. For half a franc he will gladly give up his serenading.”
“Madame, if you will not show me the garden I will not see it at all. I will go now and will never come into it again. I do not pretend.”
“Ah!” she said, and her voice was quite changed. “But you do worse.”
“Worse!”
“Yes. You lie in the face of Africa.”
She did not wish or mean to say it, and yet she had to say it. She knew it was monstrous that she should speak thus to him. What had his lies to do with her? She had been told a thousand, had heard a thousand told to others. Her life had been passed in a world of which the words of the Psalmist, though uttered in haste, are a clear-cut description. And she had not thought she cared. Yet really she must have cared. For, in leaving this world, her soul had, as it were, fetched a long breath. And now, at the hint of a lie, it instinctively recoiled as from a gust of air laden with some poisonous and suffocating vapour.
“Forgive me,” she added. “I am a fool. Out here I do love truth.”
Androvsky dropped his eyes. His whole body expressed humiliation, and something that suggested to her despair.