DAMIER was well aware that some trivial and purely subjective fancy or emotion may oddly color and distort reality for one, and he was not quite able to decide whether change there really were in Madame Vicaud, or whether it was only in his imagination that the difference he had fancied in her on that evening was continued during the following days. She seemed, in her relations with him, more intimate and yet more effaced; and he was almost sure—or was it only the reflection of his own solicitude cast upon her?—that she watched him, speculated upon him, more than at any time in their friendship, and always with that controlled agitation. It was almost as if she guessed his new knowledge and understanding of her sorrows and humiliations; as if she wondered how much he knew, and how much he was going to let her see that he knew. And if she seemed more intimate yet more effaced, Claire, for a little while at all events, was less intimate yet more in evidence. He had the rather uncomfortable feeling that Claire had implied on that evening more than he had been able to understand; that she had laid upon him some responsibility that he really never had undertaken to accept: but she did not emphasize it further, seemed content to let it remain indefinitely apprehended by him, and the slight discomfort and perplexity he had felt passed from his mind, leaving only in a half-conscious undercurrent the mood of vague doubt and withdrawal, mingling with a deeper pity, a deeper desire to help—for her own sake now as well as for her mother’s.

It was odd, this hint of withdrawal and formality, in the midst of a greater kindness, when Claire occupied so much more conspicuously the foreground. She was now always with her mother; was a third in all talks and readings, listening, with eyes almost ironically vacant, her hands lying beautifully indolent in her lap, while Damier read aloud and her mother sewed. Claire did not seem to have stepped forward, but her mother seemed to have stepped back; and from the background—a mysterious one to his odd, new apprehension of things—she smiled more tenderly than before, and with yet a tremor, an intentness, as though expecting him to understand more than she could look.

And all this might be merely an emotional color in his own outlook on unchanged facts, but the color certainly was there, making a faintly tinted difference over all the mental landscape.

It was during the first days of this dim perplexity that he found himself alone once more with Madame Vicaud. He had outstayed all her guests on a Tuesday afternoon, and, the Viberts having taken Claire back to dine with them, Madame Vicaud asked the young man to share her solitude.

Now, when they were alone, and while he sat cutting the leaves of a new book they were to read together, she went about the room, putting things back in their places, closing the piano—a little restless in her restoration of composure to the room.

Presently she came to him, stood beside him, looking down at the book. “Always friends, you know,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and speaking lightly, almost incidentally.

“Why not?” Damier asked, looking up at her.

“Indeed, why not?” she returned, smiling. “Nothing, I hope, would ever change our friendship.”

“Nothing could.” She stood silently beside him, looking down, not at him, but at the volume of essays, and he added: “You will tell me if you are ever in any trouble or sorrow where I could help you, if ever so little?”

“Oh, yes; I will tell you,” she answered, still with the lightness that contrasted with the tremor of Damier’s voice.

Moving away, she asked him, presently, if he did not think that Claire’s singing that afternoon had been very intelligent. She had sung OrfÉo’s song of search and supplication through Hades, her mother accompanying her on the harp. Damier had not altogether cared for Claire’s interpretation of the song. Claire’s voice had thrown an enchantment around a rather over-emotional, yet an untender, conception of it.

“Her voice is glorious,” he said.

“The song is to me one of the most beautiful parts of the opera,” said Madame Vicaud; “that lonely, steadfast love, throbbing onward, through horror.”

“Ah,” was on Damier’s lips, “you have said what she could not sing”; but he had long felt that appreciation of Claire was the greatest pleasure he could give to her mother, and depreciation the greatest pain. He therefore sat silently looking at her, leaning forward, his hands clasped around the idle book-cutter; and Madame Vicaud, with all her calm, went on presently, taking up her sewing as she sat near the lamp with its plain green shade: “Do you think Claire’s life very gray—very dreary?”

The question from one who, on this subject of her daughter’s upbringing, seemed always inflexibly sure of her own aims, surprised Damier, and its chiming with his own recent thoughts disturbed him. After all, was, perhaps, Claire’s gray life an explanation, in one sense, of her ugly clutch at any brightness? Yet the serenity, the sweet, if laborious, dignity of the place her mother had made for her in life, hardly allowed the mitigating supposition. Claire’s life was really neither gray nor dreary. He paused, however, for a long time before saying: “From her point of view it probably is.”

“I should have liked to give her a larger life, a life of more opportunity, more gaiety. I feel the narrowness of her path as keenly as she does. Not that Claire complains.”

“You have given her your best. How could she complain?” Damier was not able quite to restrain the resentment he felt at the idea of Claire complaining.

“Ah, I could not blame her if she did,” said Madame Vicaud, her quiet eyes on her work, “for mothers personify circumstance to children; we are symbols, to them, of baffling, cramping fate; very often, and very naturally, we are fate’s whipping-boys: and when one is a young and talented and beautiful woman whose youth is passing in giving lessons, in seeing people who seldom interest or amuse her, fate must often seem to deserve blows.”

Damier, in the surge of his comprehension,—of which she must be so ignorant and at which perhaps she yet guessed,—longed to throw himself at her knees: her pity for Claire equaled, surpassed his own; and he had—not blaming her for it, thinking it, indeed, the penalty of her superiority—thought her unconscious of Claire’s pathos.

“You deepen your shadows too much,” he said; “for a daughter more like yourself your life would not be a narrow one.” He paused, for, though she did not lift her eyes, a faint flush passed over Madame Vicaud’s face.

“I see all your efforts to widen it,” he went on, hurrying away from what he felt to have been an unfortunate comparison, “the flowers you strew: intellectual, artistic interests, friends that you hope she may find congenial, your delightful teas.”

“Oh—our teas!” Madame Vicaud interrupted, smiling with a rather satirical playfulness. “No; our delightful and ‘cultured’ little teas can hardly atone to Claire. She should have the gaiety, the variety, the colored experience that I had in my youth. I can well imagine that to Claire’s palate the nourishment I offer her is rather tasteless. She needs excitement, admiration, appreciation, an outlet for her energy, her intelligence.”

Damier seized the opportunity—it was, he thought, very propitious—again to ask her when he might bring some of his friends in Paris to see her, suggesting that so Claire’s social diet might be pleasantly diversified. Madame Vicaud had more than once evaded—gracefully, kindly, and decisively—all question of renewing broken ties with her country-people, or making new ones, and now, again, she slightly flushed, as though for a moment finding him tactless and inopportune; but only for a moment: when she lifted her eyes to him, it was with all their quiet confidence of gaze.

“I hardly know that that would be for Claire’s happiness or good. One must have the means of widening one’s environment if it is to be with comfort to one’s self. Our means are too limited to be diffused over a larger area. You must not forget, my friend, that we are very poor. I do not like accepting where I can offer nothing.”

“That is a false though a charming delicacy,” said Damier. “You give yourself; and I hope you won’t refuse to now, for I have almost promised you to Lady Surfex; she is very anxious to meet you.”

Madame Vicaud was silent for some moments, her eyes downcast to the work where she put firm, rapid stitches; then, in a voice that had suddenly grown icy, “Her mother did not recognize me one day, years ago, when she met me walking with my husband,” she said.

It was now Damier’s turn to flush. He nerved himself, after a moment, to say:

“But this is not the mother.”

“No; and my husband is dead: otherwise the wish to meet me would not overcome that disability.”

“You are a little unjust, my dearest friend,” said the young man.

“I know the world,” she replied; but she raised her eyes in saying it, and looked at him with a sad kindness that separated him from the world she knew. “I don’t judge it—only see it as it is. It seeks happiness, it avoids unhappiness. To be unfortunate is to be lost, in its eyes—to sink from sight. To be fortunate is to have a radiance around one; and the world seeks radiance.”

After looking at him she again bent her eyes, and still sewed on while she spoke. “When I needed it, it abandoned me. When I was in the dark, it did not look for me. I strayed—through stubborn folly, perhaps; perhaps, too, through generous ignorance—into a quicksand, and not a hand was held out to me. I was allowed to sink; I was dÉclassÉe, I am dÉclassÉe, in the eyes of all of those who were of my world.” The cold flame of a long resentment burned in her steady voice. “I have tested average human nature,” she resumed, after a slight pause, in which he saw her breast heave slowly. “It is a severe test, I own; but, after it, it is with difficulty that I can trust again. I have no wish to know people who, if I were in dire straits, would pass over on the other side of the way. The few friends I have I have proved—the comtesse, Madame DÉpressier, Lady Vibert, Monsieur Daunay,—who had much to bear from my husband,—Sophie; there are a few more, very few; and then, you, my friend.”

She stopped sewing—the rapid movements of her hand had been almost automatic—and looked at him, her work falling to her knee. “Come here,” she said, holding out her hand to him, “come here. Have I seemed harsh to you?” Her sudden smile dwelt on him with a divine sweetness. “I am harsh—but not to you.”

Damier, with an eagerness almost pathetically boyish, had sprung to her side, and she took his hand, smiling up at him. “Not to you. You have enlarged my trust—need I say how much? Don’t ask me to alloy it with dubious admixtures.”

His love for her was yet so founded on a sort of sacred fear that at this moment of delicious happiness he did not dare to stoop and confess all with a lover’s kiss upon her hair, did not even dare to look a confession of more than a responsive affection.

She pressed his hand, still smiling at him, and then, resuming her sewing, “Sit near me,” she said, “so I can see that you are not fancying that I am harsh with you!”

At such moments he could see in her eyes, that caressed one, made sweetest amends to one, touches of what must once have been enchanting roguishness.

“But I am still going to risk your harshness,” he said; “I am still going to ask you to let your trust in me include my friend. She would stand tests. Won’t you take my word for it?”

“I believe that I would take your word for anything.”

“And,” said Damier, looking his thanks, “all you say is true. I don’t want to justify man’s ways to man; and yet ordinary human nature, with its almost inevitable self-regarding instinct, its climb toward happiness, its ugly struggle for successful attainment of it, is more forgetful than cruel toward unhappiness. One must be patient with it; one must remember that only the exceptional natures can rise above that primitive instinct. To take the other road is to embrace the sacrifice of all the second-rate joys—the only real joys to the average human being. One must either yield to the instinct or fight it, and most people are too lazy, too skeptical of other than apparent good, to do that. And then you must remember—I must, for how often I have struggled with these thoughts!—that misfortune is a mask, a disguise. One can’t be recognized and known when one wears it; one can’t show one’s self; if one could there would perhaps be responses. People are base—most of them are base, perhaps; but sometimes they are only blind or stupid.”

“I sometimes think that I am all three,” said Madame Vicaud, after a little pause. “Misfortune’s distorting mask has become in me an actuality. I am perhaps blinded; certainly, as I told you, warped and hardened. I used not to be so; it was, I suppose, latent in me: I could not bear the fiery ordeal; the good shriveled and the dross remained.”

She spoke with a full gravity, no hint of plaintive self-pity, no appeal for contradiction, in her voice; yet, on raising her saddened eyes, she had to smile when she met his look.

“I see,” she said, “that you are determined to take me at your own valuation, not at mine.”

She turned the talk after that; she could seldom be led to talk of herself, and not until dinner was over, not until, after it, he had read to her for an hour, did she return to its subject. Then it was when he rose to go that, giving him her hand in farewell, she said:

“Bring your friend; I shall be glad to see her.”