‘But, Mademoiselle,’ I pleaded—I would not be discouraged—‘you told me one day, not so long ago, that you would never judge me hastily again.’
‘Facts judge you, not I,’ she answered icily. ‘I am not sufficiently on a level with you to be able to judge you—I thank God.’
I shivered though the sun was on me, and the hollow where we stood was warm.
‘Still, once before you thought the same,’ I exclaimed after a pause, ‘and afterwards you found that you had been wrong. It may be so again, Mademoiselle.’
‘Impossible,’ she said.
That stung me.
‘No,’ I cried. ‘It is not impossible. It is you who are impossible. It is you who are heartless, Mademoiselle. I have done much in the last three days to make things lighter for you, much to make things more easy; now I ask you to do something in return which can cost you nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ she answered slowly—and she looked at me; and her eyes and her voice cut me as if they had been knives. ‘Nothing? Do you think, Monsieur, it costs me nothing to lose my self-respect, as I do with every word I speak to you? Do you think it costs me nothing to be here when I feel every look you cast upon me an insult, every breath I take in your presence a contamination? Nothing, Monsieur?’ she continued with bitter irony. ‘Nay, something! But something which I could not hope to make clear to you.’
I sat for a moment confounded, quivering with pain. It had been one thing to feel that she hated and scorned me, to know that the trust and confidence which she had begun to place in me were transformed to loathing. It was another to listen to her hard, pitiless words, to change colour under the lash of her gibing tongue. For a moment I could not find voice to answer her. Then I pointed to M. de Cocheforet.
‘Do you love him?’ I said hoarsely, roughly. The gibing tone had passed from her voice to mine.