The Red Lily, vol 3 | Page 4

wish to sample the author's ideas before making
an entire meal of them. D.W.]

THE RED LILY
By ANATOLE FRANCE

BOOK 3.
CHAPTER XXIII
"ONE IS NEVER KIND WHEN ONE IS IN LOVE"
The next day, in the hidden pavilion of the Via Alfieri, she found him
preoccupied. She tried to distract him with ardent gayety, with the
sweetness of pressing intimacy, with superb humility. But he remained
sombre. He had all night meditated, labored over, and recognized his
sadness. He had found reasons for suffering. His thought had brought
together the hand that dropped a letter in the post-box before the bronze
San Marco and the dreadful unknown who had been seen at the station.
Now Jacques Dechartre gave a face and a name to the cause of his
suffering. In the grandmother's armchair where Therese had been

seated on the day of her welcome, and which she had this time offered
to him, he was assailed by painful images; while she, bent over one of
his arms, enveloped him with her warm embrace and her loving heart.
She divined too well what he was suffering to ask it of him simply.
In order to bring him back to pleasanter ideas, she recalled the secrets
of the room where they were and reminiscences of their walks through
the city. She was gracefully familiar.
"The little spoon you gave me, the little red lily spoon, I use for my tea
in the morning. And I know by the pleasure I feel at seeing it when I
wake how much I love you."
Then, as he replied only in sentences sad and evasive, she said:
"I am near you, but you do not care for me. You are preoccupied by
some idea that I do not fathom. Yet I am alive, and an idea is nothing."
"An idea is nothing? Do you think so? One may be wretched or happy
for an idea; one may live and one may die for an idea. Well, I am
thinking."
"Of what are you thinking?"
"Why do you ask? You know very well I am thinking of what I heard
last night, which you had concealed from me. I am thinking of your
meeting at the station, which was not due to chance, but which a letter
had caused, a letter dropped--remember!--in the postbox of San
Michele. Oh, I do not reproach you for it. I have not the right. But why
did you give yourself to me if you were not free?"
She thought she must tell an untruth.
"You mean some one whom I met at the station yesterday? I assure you
it was the most ordinary meeting in the world."
He was painfully impressed with the fact that she did not dare to name
the one she spoke of. He, too, avoided pronouncing that name.

"Therese, he had not come for you? You did not know he was in
Florence? He is nothing more to you than a man whom you meet
socially? He is not the one who, when absent, made you say to me, 'I
can not?' He is nothing to you?"
She replied resolutely:
"He comes to my house at times. He was introduced to me by General
Lariviere. I have nothing more to say to you about him. I assure you he
is of no interest to me, and I can not conceive what may be in your
mind about him."
She felt a sort of satisfaction at repudiating the man who had insisted
against her; with so much harshness and violence, upon his rights of
ownership. But she was in haste to get out of her tortuous path. She
rose and looked at her lover, with beautiful, tender, and grave eyes.
"Listen to me: the day when I gave my heart to you, my life was yours
wholly. If a doubt or a suspicion comes to you, question me. The
present is yours, and you know well there is only you, you alone, in it.
As for my past, if you knew what nothingness it was you would be glad.
I do not think another woman made as I was, to love, would have
brought to you a mind newer to love than is mine. That I swear to you.
The years that were spent without you--I did not live! Let us not talk of
them. There is nothing in them of which I should be ashamed. To regret
them is another thing. I regret to have known you so late. Why did you
not come sooner? You could have known me five years ago as easily as
to- day. But, believe me, we should not tire ourselves with speaking of
time that has gone. Remember Lohengrin. If you love me, I am for you
like