“What you say has upset me. I don’t rightly understand. But I am beginning to see. … Then, you yourself. …”
“I have been through all these torments.”
“Is it possible? … But, even so, you will never make me believe that you would have done the same as that woman.”
“I have no child, Christophe. I do not know what I should have done in her place.”
“No. That is impossible. I believe in you. I respect you too much. I swear that you could not.”
“Swear nothing! I have been very near doing what she has done. … It hurts me to destroy the good idea you had of me. But you must learn to know us a little if you do not want to be unjust. Yes, I have been within an ace of just such an act of folly. And you yourself had something to do with my not going on with it. It was two years ago. I was going through a period of terrible depression, that seemed to be eating my life away. I kept on telling myself that I was no use in the world, that nobody needed me, that even my husband could do without me, that I had lived for nothing. … I was on the very point of running away, to do Heaven knows what! I went up to your room. … Do you remember? … You did not understand why I came. I came to say goodbye to you. … And then, I don’t know what happened, I can’t remember exactly … but I know that something you said … (though you had no idea of it. …) … was like a flash of light to me. … Perhaps it was not what you said. … Perhaps it was only a matter of opportunity; at that moment the least thing was enough to make or mar me. … When I left you I went back to my own room, locked myself in, and wept the whole day through. … I was better after that: the crisis had passed.”
“And now,” asked Christophe, “you are sorry?”
“Now?” she said. “Ah! If I had been so mad as to do it I should have been at the bottom of the Seine long ago. I could not have borne the shame of it, and the injury I should have done to my poor husband.”
“Then you are happy?”
“Yes. As happy as one can be in this life. It is so rare for two people to understand each other, and respect each other, and know that they are sure of each other, not merely with a simple lover’s belief, which is often an illusion, but as the result of years passed together, gray, dull, commonplace years even—especially with the memory of the dangers through which they have passed together. And as they grow older their trust grows greater and finer.”
She stopped and blushed suddenly.
“Oh, Heavens! How could I tell you that? … What have I done? … Forget it, Christophe, I beg of you. No one must know.”
“You need not be afraid,” said Christophe, pressing her hand warmly. “It shall be sacred to me.”
Madame Arnaud was unhappy at what she had said, and turned away for a moment.
Then she went on:
“I ought not to have told you. … But, you see, I wanted to show you that even in the closest and best marriages, even for the women … whom you respect, Christophe … there are times, not only of aberration, as you say, but of real, intolerable suffering, which may drive them to madness, and wreck at least one life, if not two. You must not be too hard. Men and women make each other suffer terribly even when they love each other dearly.”
“Must they, then, live alone and apart?”
“That is even worse for us. The life of a woman who has to live alone, and fight like men (and often against men), is a terrible thing in a society which is not ready for the idea of it, and is, in a great measure, hostile to it. …”
She stopped again, leaning forward a little, with her eyes fixed on the fire in the grate; then she went on softly, in a rather hushed tone, hesitating every now and then, stopping, and then going on:
“And yet it is not our fault when a woman lives like that, she does not do so from caprice, but because she is forced to do so; she has to earn her living and learn how to do without a man, since men will have nothing to do with her if she is poor. She is condemned to solitude without having any of its advantages, for in France she cannot, like a man, enjoy her independence, even in the most innocent way, without provoking scandal: everything is forbidden her. I have a friend who is a schoolmistress in the provinces. If she were shut up in an airless prison she could not be more lonely and more stifled. The middle-classes close their doors to women who struggle to earn their living by their work; they are suspected and contemned; their smallest actions are spied upon and turned to evil. The masters at the boys’ school shun them, either
