"Yes, I suppose they are," he said coldly.
He did not mean to speak coldly; but directly he had said the words he knew that his voice had become frigid.
"What a stupid ass I am!" was his comment on himself. But how to be different?
Mrs. Shiffney was looking very grave. Her drawn-down brows, her powerful lips suggested to him at this moment suffering. In London he had thought of her as a typical pleasure-seeking woman, greedy of sensation, reckless in the chase after it. And he had disliked, almost feared her, despite her careless charm. Now he felt differently about her. He had come to that point in a man's acquaintance with a woman when he says to himself, "I never understood her properly." He seemed to himself a brute. Yet what had he done?
She did not speak for several minutes. He wanted to speak, to break a silence which, to him, was painful; but he could think of nothing to say. He felt oddly moved, yet he could not have said why, perhaps even to himself. Keeping his hands clasped round his knees, he looked out beyond the gorge over the open country. Far down, at the foot of the cascades, he saw in a hollow, the clustering trees about the baths of Sidi Imcin. Along the reddish bareness of the hill showed the white blossoms of some fruit-trees, almost like a white dust flung up against the tawny breast of the earth. The water made a hoarse noise in the hidden depths of the gorge, lifted its voice into a roar as it leaped down into the valley, murmured like the voice of a happy dreamer where it slipped by among the trees. And Claude, as he sat in silence, believed that he heard clearly the threefold utterance, subtly combined, and, like some strange trinity, striving to tell him truths of life.
His eyes travelled beyond the gorge, the precipices, the tree-tops, beyond the hard white track far down beneath his feet, to the open country, bare, splendid, almost incredibly spacious, fiercely blooming in the strong colors—reds, yellows, golds—with long rolling slopes, dimpling shallow depressions, snakelike roads, visible surely for hundreds of kilometers, far-off ranges of solemn mountains whose crests seemed to hint at divinity. And as he looked he felt that he wanted, or perhaps needed, something that he had certainly never had, that must exist, that must have been, be, known to some few men and women; only that something experienced made life truly life.
For a moment, in some mysterious process of the mind, Claude mingled his companion with the dream and the longing, transfigured, standing for women rather than a woman.
During that moment Mrs. Shiffney watched him, and London desires connected with him returned to her, were very strong within her. She had come to him as a spy from an enemy's camp. She had fulfilled her mission. Any further action must be taken by Henriette—was, perhaps, at this very moment being taken by her. But if this man had been different she might well have been on his side. Even now—
Claude felt her eyes upon him and looked at her. And now she deliberately allowed him to see her thought, her desire. What did it matter if he was married? What on earth had such a commonplace matter as marriage got to do with it?
Her look, not to be misunderstood, brought Claude at once back to that firm ground on which he walked with Charmian and his own instinctive loyalty; an austere rubbish in Mrs. Shiffney's consideration of it.