The Call of the Blood | Page 3

haven't come to protest. You know we both worship individual freedom. How often in those letters haven't we written it--our respect of the right of the individual to act for him or herself, without the interference of outsiders? No, I've come to hear about it all, to hear how you managed to get into the pleasant state of mania."
On the last words his deep voice sounded sarcastic, almost patronizing. Hermione fired up at once.
"None of that from you, Emile!" she exclaimed.
Artois stirred his tea rather more than was necessary, but did not begin to drink it.
"You mustn't look down on me from a height," she continued. "I won't have it. We're all on a level when we're doing certain things, when we're truly living, simply, frankly, following our fates, and when we're dying. You feel that. Drop the analyst, dear Emile, drop the professional point of view. I see right through it into your warm old heart. I never was afraid of you, although I place you high, higher than your critics, higher than your public, higher than you place yourself. Every woman ought to be able to love, and every man. There's nothing at all absurd in the fact, though there may be infinite absurdities in the manifestation of it. But those you haven't yet had an opportunity of seeing in me, so you've nothing yet to laugh at or label. Now drink your tea."
He laughed a loud, roaring laugh, drank some of his tea, puffed out a cloud of smoke, and said:
"Whom will you ever respect?"
"Every one who is sincere--myself included."
"Be sincere with me now, and I'll go back to Paris to-morrow like a shorn lamb. Be sincere about Monsieur Delarey."
Hermione sat quite still for a moment with the bundle of letters in her lap. At last she said:
"It's difficult sometimes to tell the truth about a feeling, isn't it?"
"Ah, you don't know yourself what the truth is."
"I'm not sure that I do. The history of the growth of a feeling may be almost more complicated than the history of France."
Artois, who was a novelist, nodded his head with the air of a man who knew all about that.
"Maurice--Maurice Delarey has cared for me, in that way, for a long time. I was very much surprised when I first found it out."
"Why, in the name of Heaven?"
"Well, he's wonderfully good-looking."
"No explanation of your astonishment."
"Isn't it? I think, though, it was that fact which astonished me, the fact of a very handsome man loving me."
"Now, what's your theory?"
He bent down his head a little towards her, and fixed his great, gray eyes on her face.
"Theory! Look here, Emile, I dare say it's difficult for a man like you, genius, insight, and all, thoroughly to understand how an ugly woman regards beauty, an ugly woman like me, who's got intellect and passion and intense feeling for form, color, every manifestation of beauty. When I look at beauty I feel rather like a dirty little beggar staring at an angel. My intellect doesn't seem to help me at all. In me, perhaps, the sensation arises from an inward conviction that humanity was meant originally to be beautiful, and that the ugly ones among us are--well, like sins among virtues. You remember that book of yours which was and deserved to be your one artistic failure, because you hadn't put yourself really into it?"
Artois made a wry face.
"Eventually you paid a lot of money to prevent it from being published any more. You withdrew it from circulation. I sometimes feel that we ugly ones ought to be withdrawn from circulation. It's silly, perhaps, and I hope I never show it, but there the feeling is. So when the handsomest man I had ever seen loved me, I was simply amazed. It seemed to me ridiculous and impossible. And then, when I was convinced it was possible, very wonderful, and, I confess it to you, very splendid. It seemed to help to reconcile me with myself in a way in which I had never been reconciled before."
"And that was the beginning?"
"I dare say. There were other things, too. Maurice Delarey isn't at all stupid, but he's not nearly so intelligent as I am."
"That doesn't surprise me."
"The fact of this physical perfection being humble with me, looking up to me, seemed to mean a great deal. I think Maurice feels about intellect rather as I do about beauty. He made me understand that he must. And that seemed to open my heart to him in an extraordinary way. Can you understand?"
"Yes. Give me some more tea, please."
He held out his cup. She filled it, talking while she did so. She had become absorbed in what she was saying, and spoke without any self-consciousness.
"I knew my gift, such as it is, the gift of brains,