"You can't understand me; you are a woman. Often in my life, other women have said to me, after some unexplainable act of theirs: 'It is useless to try: men can never succeed in understanding us.' I say the same: A woman cannot understand a man either. I love you now because you inspire pity in me, and pity leads to tenderness and tenderness is true love, love such as I have never felt before. Each one loves in his own way. The majority of women need to feel proud when they love; the person they love must arouse the envy of others through being brave, handsome, wealthy or talented. Man almost always loves through pity, through tender compassion inspired by woman. He never feels more in love than when a woman's head reclines against his breast with the abandon of weakness; and when his hand is buried in her hair, it finds a tiny delicate head—smaller than he had ever imagined—a head that is filled with divine words, irresistible charms, and noble impulses, but which rarely has that force of thought which makes man superior to her. Her adorable arms are not strong enough to protect her. And man, seeing her so lovely and so weak, feels his passion increase with pity and the desire to protect her."
"No," she said. "Woman, too, knows the meaning of compassionate love. A man for whom she feels indifference suddenly interests her, when she sees that he is unhappy; and a woman, who hates her lover one day, returns to him the next, when she feels that he is in danger. She never speaks more tenderly than when she says, 'My poor little boy!'"
The Prince assented with a gesture. That was all very well. But immediately he returned to the subject which interested him.
"To-day we both know misfortune; I, as well as you, since I have lost what distinguished me from other men, and which I shall never perhaps recover. But your situation is still worse; you are a woman, you are poorer, and I feel attracted to you and tell you what I never would have told you if, shut up within our own pride, we had both kept our former places in the world."
He went on talking in a soothing tone almost in her ear, coming closer to her, and breathing the perfume of the fur boa around her neck, which seemed to have concentrated in itself the perfume of her whole body.
He repeated what he had thought in the nights when he had struggled with his former dread; thoughts that he had vigorously resumed shortly before, as he was sitting silently by her side in the carriage. He talked of the future. They might still be happy; the love he offered her was of the quiet, lasting kind; an autumnal love, a love that would be for all time, with no dramatic complications, peaceful, tranquil, sweetly uneventful, like the long winter evenings beside a fire.
She laughed with a pained expression.
"You forget who I am; you talk as though the past did not exist, as though you were not yourself and as though all the stories that weigh against my name did not exist. If some one else were to make me this proposal, who knows!... I am weary and the thought of a quiet future attracts me. But you!... With you it would be impossible: It would end disastrously. I prefer that we be friends, without any thought of love. It is safer and more lasting."
On seeing his look of dismay, Alicia went on talking. She was not afraid of living with him because of what people might say. It is true that she had a husband, who now in the throes of a senile passion would refuse to grant her a divorce. But what did she care for an obstacle like that, or for what people would say about it!... She had done more daring things in her life!
"It is simply that I do not want to. Don't ask me why: I could not explain it to you; or I should say, you would not understand me. I repeat what other women have said to you: 'You are a man, and cannot understand women.' No, I don't want to. I shall speak more plainly: Another man might succeed in interesting me—I don't know. We are so weak! Our wills play us such strange tricks! But with you, no.... We know each other too well: It is impossible."