YET that very evening Damier was to have his freshly emphasized disgust unsettled, as theories are so constantly unsettled by new developments of fact. Claire did not show him a new fact about herself; she merely explained herself a little further, and made it evident that one could not label her “vulgar” and so dispose of her.

It was, curiously, with a keener throb of pity, in the very midst of all his new reasons for disliking her, that he found her alone in the salon, sitting, in her white evening dress, near the open window—opened on the warm spring twilight. There was something of lassitude in her posture, the half-droop of her head as she stared vaguely at the sky, something of passive, patient strength, a creature that no one could love—even—even—he had wondered over it more and more of late—her mother? The wonder never came without a sense of fear for the desecration that such a thought implied in its forcing itself into an inner shrine of sorrow.

His vision in all that concerned the woman he loved had something of a clairvoyant quality. At times he felt himself closing his ears, shutting his eyes, to whispers, glimpses, which as yet he had no right to see or hear.

That evening he was to dine with Madame Vicaud, Claire, and little Sophie; and Claire’s gown, he felt in prospective, would make poor Sophie’s ill-fitting blouse look odd by contrast in the box at the theater where he was afterward to take them. He had, indeed, never seen the girl look more lovely. His over-early arrival had had as its object the hope of finding, not the daughter, but the mother, alone. Yet, sitting there in the quiet evening air, talking quietly, looking from dim tree-tops outside to Claire’s white form and splendid head, he felt that the unasked-for hour had its interest, even its charm. Claire did not charm him, but the mystery of her deep thoughts and shallow heart was as alluring to his mind as the merely pictorial attraction of her beauty to his eye.

“The chief thing,” said Claire,—they had been talking in a desultory fashion about life, and in speaking she stretched out her arm in its transparent sleeve and looked at it with her placid, powerful look, adjusting its fall of lace over her hand,—“the chief thing is to know what you want and to determine to get it. People who do that get what they want, you know—unless circumstances are peculiarly antagonistic.” (Damier, in the light of his recent knowledge, found this phrase very pregnant.) “You, for instance, have never known exactly what you wanted; therefore you have got nothing. My father knew that he wanted to paint well—you rarely hear us speak of my father, do you?—though Mamma, you see, has his photograph conspicuously en Évidence up there, lest I should think too ill of him—or guess how ill she thinks of him herself. I hardly knew my father at all; he was, no doubt, what is called a very bad man, but clever, very clever. He determined to paint well, and he did. You know his pictures. I don’t care about pictures, but I suppose there are few of that epoch that can be compared to that Luxembourg canvas of his. Mamma, do you know, never goes to see it. She has never really recovered from the shock poor papa gave her prejudices—the prejudices of the jeune fille anglaise. I”—she smiled a little at him, gliding quickly past the silent displeasure that her last words had evoked in his expression—“I have a very restricted field for choice; but I determine to be well dressed. I have small aims, you say; but with me, as yet, circumstances are very antagonistic. I should like many pleasures, but as there is only one I can achieve, I am wise as well as determined; what I do determine comes to pass. And Mamma—yes, I am coming to her. Mamma wanted to be good, and she is, you see, perfectly good. And, even more than that, perhaps, she wanted me to be good, too; but there either her will was too weak or I too wicked—the latter, probably, for she has a strong will.”

“Perhaps,” said Damier, smiling as he leaned back in his chair, arms folded and knees crossed, listening to her—“perhaps you underestimate her success, or overestimate the Luciferian splendor of your own nature.”

“I don’t think it is at all splendid,” said Claire, composedly; “some wickedness is, I grant you; but do I strike you as affecting that kind?”

“I must own that you don’t.”

“Or, indeed, as affecting anything either picturesque or desirable?” she pursued.

Again Damier had to own that she affected no such thing.

“Ah, that is well. I should not like you to misinterpret me,” said Claire. “I make no poses.” And after a slight pause in which he wondered anew over her, she added: “I merely like enjoyment better than anything else in the world.”

“Yours, you know, is a very old philosophy—a universe of will and enjoyment; but one must have a great deal of the former to attain the latter in a world of so many clashing aims,” said Damier.

“Yes, one must.”

“And not the highest type of will. The world, so seen, is a terrible one.”

“Do you think so?” Her look, from the sky, drifted lazily down to him.

“Don’t you?”

“No; I think it wonderful, enthralling, if one attains one’s aims; it is all beautiful, even the suffering—if one avoids suffering one’s self.”

“You are an esthete—

“Oh, better than rain—the tempest!”

“And how can one avoid suffering, pray?”

“Mais,”—Claire had a tolerant smile for his naÏvetÉ,—“by staying under the roof, laughing round the fire. Mamma, you see, would be darting out continually into the storm.”

“Bringing other people back to shelter.”

“And crowding us uncomfortably round the fire, getting the rest of us wet!” smiled Claire. “For a case in point—don’t you find Sophie a bore? She was going to commit suicide when Mamma, through something Miss Vibert said, found her. Yes, I assure you, the charcoal was lit—her last sous spent on it. And really, do you know, I think it would have been a wise thing. Don’t be too much horrified at my heartlessness. I mean that Sophie will never enjoy herself; nothing in this world will ever satisfy her. When she has enough to eat she can realize more clearly her higher wants. And—I don’t want to seem more ungenerous than I am, but, as a result, we have less to eat ourselves. Don’t look so stony; I am not really un mauvais coeur. I would willingly dot Sophie, buy her the best husband procurable if I had the money; but husbands and houses and money wouldn’t make Sophie comfortable, and I don’t really see that much is gained by making two people less so in order to insure the survival of one unfit little Pole.”

“I need hardly tell you that I don’t share the ruthless materialism of that creed. Who, my dear young woman, are you, to pronounce on Sophie’s unfitness, and to decide that you, rather than she, have a right to survival?”

Claire looked at him for a moment with a smile unresentful and yet rueful.

“How often you surprise me,” she said, “and how often you make me feel that I don’t, even yet, quite understand you! It is so difficult to realize that a person so comprehending can at the same time be so rigid. With you tout comprendre is not tout pardonner.”

“By no means,” Damier owned, unable to repress a smile.

“Well, I would far rather have you understand me completely, even if you can’t forgive. I told you that I was wicked; one good point I have: I never pretend to be better than I am.”

“And one better point you have, and that is that you are better than you know.” Damier spoke lightly, but at the moment he believed what he spoke.

Claire smiled without replying, and said, after a little silence:

“Of course you have seen how good Mamma is. You both of you have a moral perfume, and recognize it in each other. I puzzle and worry her so because I won’t suffer, won’t go out of my life into other people’s. You asked me how one could avoid suffering; really, for the most part, it is very easy to avoid. Sympathy is the fatal thing: to suffer with—why should one? It is a mere increasing of the suffering in the world, if one comes to think of it. The wise thing is to concentrate one’s self—to bring things to one’s self; but it is that wisdom that Mamma will not understand in me.”

Damier made no comment on these assertions, and Claire, as if she had expected none, as if, indeed, she were expounding herself and her mother for her own benefit as well as his, went on:

“She is very energetic, too, Mamma, as energetic as I am, but in a different way. She is always striving—against things; I wait. Even if she can’t see distinctly at what she is aiming, she is always aiming at something; I never aim unless I see something to aim at.”

“What things do you aim at?” he now asked.

“Oh—you know; things that Mamma despises—things that you too despise, perhaps, but that, at all events, you understand.” He could not quite interpret the glance that rested upon him. “And Mamma’s aims—I suppose you don’t care to hear what I think of them?”

“On the contrary, for you think very clearly. But I know what she has aimed at. What has she attained?”

He asked himself the question, indeed, with an inner lamentation for the one evident, the one tragic failure.

“Well,”—Claire clasped her hands behind her head and looked out of the window,—“for one thing, she has kept herself—she hasn’t attained it: that wasn’t needful—trÈs grande dame. She has always made herself a social milieu congenial to her, or gone without one. For herself she would not choose and exclude so carefully; but I complicate Mamma’s spontaneous impulses. The social milieu has always been to her a soil in which to try to grow my soul; that is why she is so careful about the soil; if it were not for me she would probably choose the stoniest and ugliest, and beautify it by blooming in it, since her soul is strong and beneficent.”

Half repelled and half attracted as Damier had been, it was now with more of attraction than repulsion that he listened, an attraction that had many sources. That she should so finely appreciate her mother was one. It was touching—meant to be so, perhaps, for even in his attraction he had these moments of doubt; but a sincerity that could paint herself so unbecomingly and her mother so beautifully was a new revelation of her frankness. There was attraction, too, though of a mingled quality, in her strength and in her apparent indifference to his impression of her. These were better things than the glamour; yet that, too, he felt, as when she turned her eyes on him and said that the world was beautiful. At such moments something joyous and conscienceless in him responded to her, half intellectual comprehension and half mere flesh and blood. It was a little swirl of emotion that his soul, calm and disdainfully aloof, could look down on and observe, in no danger of being shaken by it; but it did swirl through him like a tremulous coil of Venusberg music; and Claire, in her transparent white, with her heavy braids and grave, shining eyes, gleamed at such moments with the baleful beauty of the eternal siren. As long as one was human something human in one must respond to that siren call. Even now, when he was feeling, with some bewilderment, better things in her, the glamour looking from her eyes, breathing from her serious lips, confused and troubled the new impulse of trust and pity. Half lightly, half sadly, yet with a very gentle kindliness, he said to her: “Strong enough to make you flower some day, let us believe”; and, as silently she still gazed upon him: “That you should recognize beauty is already a flower, you know.”

Still leaning back, her arms behind her head, still looking at him, Claire now said: “I owe that flower, not to her, but to you.”

He stared for a moment, not comprehending.

“You mean that you see her, appreciate her, through my sight, my appreciation?”

“Yes—in a sense, I mean that.”

“But,” said Damier, smiling, “you owe it to her that there is something beautiful to see.”

He was mystified, not quite trusting, yet touched.

Claire, without moving, turned her eyes on the door. “Here she is,” she said; and as her mother entered, she added, in the lowest voice above a whisper, so vaguely that it was like a fragrant perturbing influence breathing from the twilight and the spring air:

“I like to owe all my flowers to you.”

Already, as he rose to greet the mother, he liked the daughter less.

Madame Vicaud, in her black dress, with flowing white about her wrists and throat,—a throat erect and beautiful,—had closed the door softly behind her, and as she came toward him, Damier, involuntarily carrying further his Venusberg simile of some moments before, thought of an Elizabeth bringing peace and radiance; yet there was, too, a gravity in her gaze, a quick intentness that went swiftly from her daughter to him. Then the smile and the lightness masked her. She took his hand.

“Has not Sophie come yet? Of what have you been talking?”

“Of life, and how to live it,” laughed Damier.

“Wise young people! Was it a contest of sublimities?” Madame Vicaud laid down the evening wrap she had brought in, and, it seemed to Damier, averted her face from him as she took up a box of matches.

“Do I ever fight under the banner of sublimity, Mamma?” Claire inquired, looking out of the window, showing once more her accustomed lassitude and detachment. “I leave those becoming colors to you—and to Mr. Damier.”

“But don’t, even in jest, my dear, assume always the unbecoming ones,” Madame Vicaud replied, still with all her lightness, and bending, her face still averted, to strike a match. “You have discovered, have you not, Mr. Damier, that it is difficult for Claire to assume the virtues that she has?”

She moved about the room, lighting the candles on the mantelpiece and on the cabinet where her husband’s portrait stood; and Damier, watching the swift blackness of her girlish figure, the slender white of her uplifted hand,—the black more black, the white more white, as the radiance slowly grew in the dim room,—still fancied that she was mastering some emotion, hiding from him some sudden agitation. There was a faint flush on her face as she turned, gaily and sweetly, blowing out and tossing away her match, to welcome Sophie.