He rose too, holding her and put the eternal question.
“But why?”
“You deserve a wife who loves you. I don’t love you. I never could love you”—and then from the infinite spaces of loneliness there spread about her soul a frozen desolation, and she stood as one blasted by Polar wind—“I shall never love a man all my life long. I am not made like that.”
And she seemed to shrivel in his grasp and, flitting between the snow-clad tables like a wraith, was gone.
“Bigre!” said Bigourdin, sitting down again.
Soon afterwards, Fortinbras and Martin, coming in from the terrace, found him sprawling over the table a monumental mass of dejection. But, full of their own conceits, they did not divine his misery. Fortinbras smote him friendly wise on his broad back and aroused him from lethargy.
“It is all arranged, mon vieux Gaspard,” he cried heartily. “I have been pouring into awakening ears all the divine distillations of my philosophy. I have initiated him into mysteries. He is a neophyte of whom I am proud.”
Bigourdin, in no mood for allusive hyperbole, shook himself like a great dog.
“What kind of imbecility are you talking?”