"I know it. Yes. You are right. I did not think what I was saying….
Who knows? I should do it, perhaps."
"No. You are unfair to yourself. You are so kind."
"If I am roused to passion, I am as cruel as the rest. You see how I had lost control of myself!… But when you see a friend brought to tears, how can you not hate the person who has caused them? And how can one be too hard on a woman who leaves her child to run after her lover?"
"Don't talk like that, Christophe. You don't know."
"What! You defend her?"
"I pity her, too."
"I pity those who suffer. Not those who cause suffering."
"Well! Do you think she hasn't suffered too? Do you think she has left her child and wrecked her life out of lightness of heart? For her life is wrecked too. I hardly know her, Christophe. I have only seen her a few times, and that only in passing: she never said a friendly word to me, she was not in sympathy with me. And yet I know her better than you. I am sure she is not a bad woman. Poor child! I can guess what she has had to go through…."
"You…. You whose life is so worthy and so right and sensible!…"
"Yes, Christophe, I. You do not know. You are kind, but you are a man and, like all men, you are hard, in spite of your kindness—a man hard and set against everything which is not in and of yourself. You have no real knowledge of the women who live with you. You love them, after your fashion; but you never take the trouble to understand them. You are so easily satisfied with yourselves! You are quite sure that you know us…. Alas! If you knew how we suffer sometimes when we see, not that you do not love us, but how you love us, and that that is all we are to those we love the best! There are moments, Christophe, when we clench our fists so that the nails dig into our hands to keep ourselves from crying to you: 'Oh! Do not love us, do not love us! Anything rather than love us like that!'… Do you know the saying of a poet: 'Even in her home, among her children, surrounded with sham honors, a woman endures a scorn a thousand times harder to bear than the most utter misery'? Think of that, Christophe. They are terrible words."