Annette was overwhelmed. "My poor child, it wasn't my fault. I didn't wish it. . . ."
Noémi seized upon this compassionate word, "Your child, you said. . . . Yes, be a mother, an older sister to me! Don't hurt me! Advise me. Tell me what I should do. I don't want to lose him. . . . Tell me, tell me. . . . I will do anything you say. . . ."
She was speaking only half falsely. She was so accustomed to shamming what she felt that she felt what she shammed. And her love, her grief, her need of Annette, her hope of touching her, were certainly real. Even this confidence she showed in her—the last card she had to play. She played it with a passion of despair. And even as she unbosomed herself, she did not lose sight of the disquietude that Annette's face could not conceal. Annette was weakening. Noémi's self-abandonment disarmed her. She no longer had the strength to reply. She was not deceived, however. The sugary tone of some of her adversary's inflections threw light on the latter's duplicity. She let her talk. She read her depths. She was thinking, "What shall I do? Sacrifice myself? What a sell! I will not. I don't like this woman. She lies, she hates me. But she is suffering." And she stroked the head of the kneeling enemy, who continued to groan and watch her, following her vacillating will as if it were her prey, with a shiver of fear, of acute breathless half-sanguinary joy, and who, at the right moments, pressing to her lips those hands that she would gladly have bitten, repeated, tirelessly, "Let me keep him!"
Annette, with lowered brows, wanted to drive her away. She saw in those eyes trickery and grief, falsehood and love, a desperate hope. She smiled with weariness, pity and disgust for herself, for them both—for everything; and, turning aside her head, she said in a moment of weakness, "Keep him!"
No sooner had she said it than she wished to take it back. But Noémi bounded to her feet and embraced Annette with frantic protestations. . . . (She had never hated her so much! At last she had her! . . . Had her?) Annette was already saying, "No, no! . . ."
Noémi pretended not to hear. She called her darling, her best friend. She vowed eternal gratitude, eternal love. She laughed and cried. But she did not waste her time in vain effusions. She wanted to know what Annette would do to get rid of Philippe.
Annette rebelled. "I said nothing."
"You did say it. You did say it. You promised me. . . ."
"A word that escaped me. . . . You dragged it from me by surprise."
"No, you can't take it back. You said 'Keep him.' You said it, Annette. Tell me that you said it! You can't deny it. . . ."