“Are you grieving for your dignity?  He was a mediocre soul and could have given you but an unworthy existence.”

She did not even smile at those words, but, superb, as if lifting a corner of the veil, she turned on him slowly.

“And do you imagine I would have devoted myself to him for such a purpose!  Don’t you know that reparation was due to him from me?  A sacred debt—­a fine duty.  To redeem him would not have been in my power—­I know it.  But he was blameless, and it was for me to come forward.  Don’t you see that in the eyes of the world nothing could have rehabilitated him so completely as his marriage with me?  No word of evil could be whispered of him after I had given him my hand.  As to giving myself up to anything less than the shaping of a man’s destiny—­if I thought I could do it I would abhor myself. . . .”  She spoke with authority in her deep fascinating, unemotional voice.  Renouard meditated, gloomy, as if over some sinister riddle of a beautiful sphinx met on the wild road of his life.

“Yes.  Your father was right.  You are one of these aristocrats . . .”

She drew herself up haughtily.

“What do you say?  My father! . . .  I an aristocrat.”

“Oh!  I don’t mean that you are like the men and women of the time of armours, castles, and great deeds.  Oh, no!  They stood on the naked soil, had traditions to be faithful to, had their feet on this earth of passions and death which is not a hothouse.  They would have been too plebeian for you since they had to lead, to suffer with, to understand the commonest humanity.  No, you are merely of the topmost layer, disdainful and superior, the mere pure froth and bubble on the inscrutable depths which some day will toss you out of existence.  But you are you!  You are you!  You are the eternal love itself—­only, O Divinity, it isn’t your body, it is your soul that is made of foam.”

She listened as if in a dream.  He had succeeded so well in his effort to drive back the flood of his passion that his life itself seemed to run with it out of his body.  At that moment he felt as one dead speaking.  But the headlong wave returning with tenfold force flung him on her suddenly, with open arms and blazing eyes.  She found herself like a feather in his grasp, helpless, unable to struggle, with her feet off the ground.  But this contact with her, maddening like too much felicity, destroyed its own end.  Fire ran through his veins, turned his passion to ashes, burnt him out and left him empty, without force—­almost without desire.  He let her go before she could cry out.  And she was so used to the forms of repression enveloping, softening the crude impulses of old humanity that she no longer believed in their existence as if it were an exploded legend.  She did not recognise what had happened to her.  She came safe out of his arms, without a struggle, not even having felt afraid.

“What’s the meaning of this?” she said, outraged but calm in a scornful way.