“Please forgive me.”
“What special mark of her culture has Helen given you?”
“Culture? That would have been by far too bad. Besides, it was something perhaps even worse: a mark of character, firm conviction.”
“Up to now,” he continued, “I had been quite satisfied with the girl; so, a few days ago, I proposed that she should give up her employment and come to live with me. Would you believe it? I met with a point-blank refusal. You fancy, perhaps, it was marriage she wanted, or something of that kind; and, word of honour! If she had, I would have taken her willingly.... Not at all. She told me sententiously that ‘although she recognized free love, she never would be a kept woman!’ What do you think of that, eh? Ha, ha! It’s something astounding, isn’t it?”
But I could not laugh. I sat silent, thinking of many things, far more pained than amused.
Stephen continued: “A girl with such splendidly expressionless eyes of a bright azure, like a piece of water! No shadow of any yearning for the Beyond, no shadow of anything like intellect or brightness of thought!... By day they reflected the sun, her lamp in the evening, and my own eyes at night. They had the beautiful dead gleam of pearls. She might have been less pretty: with such eyes, she was pretty enough for me. And then, that slow, sleepy, brainless voluptuousness in her glance! And her white flashing teeth, too! I tell you, there is not a single spot or flaw in any one of them; her molars are like the molars of a ruminant, large and flat. She did, it is true, write me letters without necessity; but, through my influence and under my direction, she had come even to forget her alphabet. She truly gave me the impression (false as I know now) that she never thought at all.
“And that girl ‘recognizes free love’! Such a surprise may well make one throw all the beliefs of one’s life on the dustheap!”
All this talk of his seemed to me decidedly shallow and foolish. Why on earth was he trying, by means of that far-fetched theory of his, to justify the fact that the woman simply bored him?
He has now made up his mind to seek for his future Dulcineas amongst kitchen-maids.
“Dressmakers have decidedly too much culture for my taste,” he said.