NEXT day, as Damier waited near the Porte Dauphine for Claire, he could reflect on his really parental situation, but feeling more the irritation than the humor of it. After all, where was his authority for this meddling? Why should they submit to it? and why, as a result, should he submit to the hearing of Claire’s coming self-justification? He could spare Madame Vicaud nothing by it, since she knew all that there was to know—and since it was better that she should know it. He had written to her the night before, on reaching his hotel, and told her of the talk with Monsieur Daunay and of the impression it had made upon him. He wondered if she had, meanwhile, had an equally appeasing talk with Claire.

This young woman appeared quite punctually, walking at a leisurely pace along the sanded path, where the full summer foliage cast flickering purple shadows. Claire was all in white, white that fluttered about her as she walked; her hat, tilted over her eyes, had white wings—like a Valkyrie’s summer helmet; her white parasol made a shadowed halo behind her head. As she approached him she looked at him steadily, with something whimsical, quizzical in her gaze, and her first words showed no wish to beat about the bush.

“You talked to him last night? I talked a little to Mamma, or rather she talked to me. I soon satisfied her that I didn’t feel for him, pas grand comme Ça d’amour.” Claire indicated the smallness she negatived by a quarter of an inch of finger-tip. “And I think I can soon satisfy you, too,” she added. “He told you everything?”

“Everything.”

“And you are terribly shocked that an unmarried young woman should take money from a married man who is in love with her? Must I assure you that our relations are absolutely innocent?”

In his stupefaction, Damier could hardly have said whether her first statement or the coolness of her second remark—its forestalling of a suspicion she took for granted in him—were the more striking. Both statement and remark revealed her character in a light more lurid than even he had been prepared for. He was really unable to do more than stare at her. Claire evidently misinterpreted the stare yet more outrageously. She had the grace to flush faintly, though her eyes were still half ironic, half defiant.

“I do so assure you.”

“I did not need the assurance.” Damier found his voice, but it was hoarse.

Claire, in a little pause, looked her consciousness of having struck a very false note.

“And now no assurance would convince you that I am not very low-minded and vulgar. Well, I am, I suppose. Que voulez-vous? Only don’t be too much shocked by my frankness; don’t be prudish. A man may be propriety itself, but he may not be prudish. Remember that I am twenty-seven, that I know my world (though how I have been able to get my knowledge with such a dexterously shuffling and shielding Mamma, I don’t know), and that I think it merely silly to pretend that I don’t know it before a man with whom I am as intimate as I am with you. Of course, on the face of it, to accept money from a married man who is in love with one does suggest a situation usually described as immoral.”

Damier was feeling choked, feeling, too, that he almost hated Claire, as she walked beside him, slowly and lightly, opulently lovely, the flush of anger—it was more anger than shame—still on her cheek.

“I must tell you,” he said, in a voice steeled to a terrible courtesy, “that it is you alone who inform me of your indebtedness to Monsieur Daunay’s kindness. He, I now see, did not tell me everything.”

“What did he tell you, then?” she asked, stopping short in the path and fixing her eyes upon him, in her voice a rough, almost a plebeian, note.

“That he adored you, and that he could be trusted.”

“Well, he can be!” She broke into a hard laugh. “Le cher bon Daunay! I thought that of course he would paint a piteous picture of his woes. And now you are furious with me because I supposed that, as a man of the world, you might unfairly, yet naturally, imagine more than he told you.”

Damier made no reply.

“You are furious, are you not?”

“I am disgusted, but not for that reason only.”

“You think I am in love with him!” She stopped again in the narrow path. “I swear to you that I am not!” He would have interrupted her, but her volubility swept past his attempt. “If he had been free I would have married him—I own it; at one time, at least, I would have married him. I am French in my freedom from sentimental complications on that subject. I could have found no other man in this country willing to marry a dotless girl. I should have preferred, of course, a mariage d’amour; but, given my circumstances, could I have found anything more desirable than a kind, generous, and adoring friend like Monsieur Daunay?”

“I should say certainly not,”—Damier waited with a cold patience until she had finished,—“but again you have misinterpreted me; I am disgusted not because you love Monsieur Daunay, but because you do not love him.”

At this, after a stare, Claire gave a loud laugh.

“Ah!—c’est trop fort! You can’t make me believe that you want me to love him.”

“I don’t want you to love him; but I say that the circumstances would be more to your credit if you did.”

Her face now showed a mingled relief and perplexity.

“Ah, it is the money, then—that I should accept it!”

“Can I make no appeal to you for your mother’s sake—for the sake of your own dignity?”

“I can take care of my own dignity, Mr. Damier.” The relief was showing in her quieter voice, her fading flush. “I see how angry you are—and only because I have not pretended with you. Let me explain. I never pretend with you: I can only explain. I must begin at the beginning to do it; and the beginning and the end is our poverty. Mamma had a pittance left to her, a year or so after my father’s death, by some relations, and that, since then, has been our only pied-À-terre. She would never accept the allowance, quite a generous one, too, that her family wished to make her. I don’t want to blame her; I know how you feel about her; I appreciate it. But it was, I must say it, very selfish of her; she should have thought more of me—the luckless result of her mÉsalliance—and less of her own pride. I really hardly know how she brought me up: though, I own, she gave me a good education; I was always at school during my father’s life—she avoided that soil for me, you may be sure! I give her credit for all that; she must have worked hard to do it. But she owed me all she could get for me, and, I must say, she did not pay the debt.” Claire had been looking before her as she talked, but now she looked at Damier, and something implacable, coldly enduring, in his eye warned her that her present line of exculpation was not serving her. “Don’t imagine, now, that I am complaining—ungrateful,” she said a little petulantly. “I know—as well as you do—what a good mother she has been to me. I only want to show you that she is not altogether blameless—that she is responsible, in more ways than one, for me—for what I am. Let it pass, though. When I came home, a young girl, full of life and eager for enjoyment, what did I find? Poverty, labor, obscurity. It was an ugly, a meager existence she had prepared for me, and, absolutely, with a certain pride in it! She expected me to enjoy work, shabby clothes, grave pursuits, as much as she did, or, at all events, not to mind them. Plain living, high thinking—that was her idea of happiness for me!” Insensibly the ironic note had grown again in her voice. “I remember, too, at first, her taking me to see poor people in horrid places—expecting me to talk to them, sing to them; I soon put a stop to that. At her age, with a ruined life, it is natural that one should wish to devote one’s self to bonnes-oeuvres; but for me, ah, par exemple!” Claire gave a coarse laugh. “I had not quite come to that! She gave me the best she had—all she had, you will say; I own it: but not all she might have had. And then she need not have expected me to enjoy—should not have been aggrieved, wounded, because I only endured. Again,—I am not unjust,—it was not all high thinking; she had her schemes for my amusement—d’une simplicitÉ! Really, for such a clever woman, Mamma can be dull! And the people we knew! We had a right—you know it—to le vrai grand monde. You know it, and you are trying, now, to help me to it. But Mamma did not try. With a little management she might have regained her place in it; but no—her pride again! She seemed to think that she was le grand monde, and that I ought to be satisfied with that! And now, with all this, you think it strange—disgusting—that when I saw that Daunay—le pauvre!—was in love with me I should ask him to continue to the daughter the aid that he had extended to the father! There again, for a clever woman, Mamma is dull—though her dullness has been to my advantage. She can make money, she can avoid spending it, but she has little conception of its value; she does the housekeeping, and, after that, she leaves the management of our resources to me. She is funnily gullible about the price of my clothes; the lessons I give would hardly keep me in shoes and stockings—as I understand shoes and stockings!” Claire laughed. “This dress that I have on—Mamma imagines it is made by a little dressmaker whom I am clever enough to guide with my taste. I take out the name on the waist-band and she is none the wiser. This dress is a Doucet.” There was now quite a blithe complacency in Claire’s voice. “And I have always considered myself amply excusable,” she went on, “in accepting the small pleasures that life offered me. Of course it has really not been much that I have been able to accept—though he would willingly—and he is not rich—give more. Jewels, for instance, I have never dared attempt—nor even many dresses; that would have been incautious. For Mamma, of course, must never know; she would be inexpressibly shocked. I can see her face!”

So could Damier. He was conscious of almost a wish to be brutal to Claire, physically brutal—to strike her to the dust where she dragged the image of his well beloved; but, after a moment, he said in a voice quiet enough: “You must tell her now; you must tell her everything.”

Claire stopped short in the path. “Tell her!”

“You must, indeed.” The full rigor of his eyes met the astonishment of hers.

“Never!” said Claire, and in French, as if for a more personal and intimate emphasis, she repeated: “Jamais!”

“I will, then; it is an outrage not to tell her.”

Their eyes measured each other’s resolution.

“If you do,” said Claire, “shall I tell you with what I retaliate? I will run away with Monsieur Daunay. Yes; I speak seriously. I would prefer not to be pushed to that extremity, but I sometimes think that I am getting a little tired of respectability au quatriÈme. It isn’t good enough, as you English say; I get no interest on my investment. To tell her! Now, of all times, when I so need the money, when the small gaieties and pleasures you have brought into my life depend on my having it, making an appearance! She would not let me take it. She would be glacial—and firm. Oh, I have had scenes with her! I could not stand any more.”

For once Claire was fully vehement, her cheeks flaming, her eyes at once threatening and appealing. He could hardly believe her serious, and yet she silenced him—indeed, she terrified him. Claire read the terror in his wide eyes and whitening lips. Her look suddenly grew soft, humorous. She slipped her hand inside his arm.

Involuntarily he started from her, then, repenting, for even while he so loathed her he had never found her so piteous, “I beg your pardon—but you horrify me too much.”

“Come, come,” she said, and, unresentfully, though with some determination, she secured his arm, “don’t take me au pied de la lettre. I am not really in earnest; you know that; I had to use a threat—had to frighten you. Come.” That she had been able so thoroughly to frighten him seemed to have restored in her her old air of complacent mastery. “You are wide-minded, clever, kind. Don’t misjudge me. Don’t push me to the wall. Don’t apply impossible standards to me. See me as I am. By nature, by temperament, I am simply a bohemian. It isn’t my fault if my mother happens to be a saint, and a horribly well-bred saint; it really isn’t my fault if she has handed on to me neither of those qualities. I am perfectly frank with you. From the first I felt that I could be frank with you; I felt that you understood me; don’t tell me now that I was mistaken.”

“I do understand you,” said Damier, “but you horrify me none the less.”

“I horrify you because I am a creature thwarted, distorted; nothing is more ugly or repulsive—but if I had had a chance!”

“What would a chance have done for you? You have had every chance to be noble and loving and happy—yes, happy.”

“But not in my own way!—not in my own way!” she cried, and now she clasped both hands on his arm and leaned against his shoulder as she looked into his face. “I needed power and wealth—all the real foundations of happiness and nobility. Then—ah, then I should have blossomed. Or else, failing them, I needed liberty and joy—the life of a bohemian. I have had neither the one nor the other, and if I seem almost wicked to you it is because of that; for, to me, wickedness means going against one’s nature. I have always been forced to go against mine; I have never had a chance.”

Damier gave a mirthless laugh. “On the contrary, to me wickedness means going with one’s nature.”

“Ah, there we differ; and yet we understand.”

Again he had that feeling of perplexity and irritation. Her eyes, the clasp of her hands upon his arm, irked and troubled him, and without, now, any sense of glamour in the trouble and irritation. She seemed to make too great a claim upon his understanding, and to rely too much upon some conviction of her own charm that could dare any frankness just because it was so sure of triumph. He felt that at the moment he did not understand her; he felt, too, that he did not want to—that he was tired of understanding her.

“You are an unhappy creature, Claire,” he said. They were nearing the Porte Dauphine, and while he spoke with a full yet distant gravity, Damier looked about for a fiacre. “An unhappy creature with an unawakened soul.”

“Will you try to wake it, the poor thing?” asked Claire. She still held his arm, though he had tried to disengage it, and though she spoke softly, there was a vague hardness in her eyes, as though she felt the new hardness in him, though as yet not quite interpreting its finality.

“I shouldn’t know how to: I am helpless before it. It should be made to suffer,” he said. A cab had answered his summons, and he handed her into it. “No, I cannot go home with you,” he said. “Are you going home?”

“I am going to lunch with old Mademoiselle Daunay, and see Monsieur Daunay there. I had no chance to speak to him last night.” Claire, sitting straightly in the open cab, had an expression of perplexity and of growing resentment on her face; but as he merely bowed and was about to turn away, she started forward and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Are you going to make it suffer?” she asked. He looked into her eyes. He did not understand her, but he saw in them a demand at once alluring and threatening. His one instinct was to deny strongly whatever she demanded, though he did not know what that was.

“I have no mission toward your soul, Claire,” he said. For another moment the eyes that threatened and allured dwelt on his; then, calling out the address to the cabman, she was driven away.