She stopped with a break in her voice.
"Put away your pessimism, dear Emile," she continued, after a moment.
"Tell me you think we shall be happy in our garden of paradise--tell me
that!"
But he only said, even more gravely: "So you're taking him to the real South?"
"Yes, to the blue and the genuine gold, and the quivering heat, and the
balmy nights when Etna sends up its plume of ivory smoke to the moon.
He's got the south in his blood. Well, he shall see the south first with
me, and he shall love it as I love it."
He said nothing. No spark of her enthusiasm called forth a spark from
him. And now she saw that, and said again: "London is making you horrible to-night. You are doing London and
yourself an injustice, and Maurice, too."
"It's very possible," he replied. "But--I can say it to you--I have a
certain gift of--shall I call it divination?--where men and women are
concerned. It is not merely that I am observant of what is, but that I
can often instinctively feel that which must be inevitably produced by
what is. Very few people can read the future in the present. I often can,
almost as clearly as I can read the present. Even pessimism, accentuated
by the influence of the Infernal City, may contain some grains of truth."
"What do you see for us, Emile? Don't you think we shall be happy
together, then? Don't you think that we are suited to be happy together?"
When she asked Artois this direct question he was suddenly aware of a
vagueness brooding in his mind, and knew that he had no definite answer
to make.
"I see nothing," he said, abruptly. "I know nothing. It may be London. It
may be my own egoism."
And then he suddenly explained himself to Hermione with the extraordinary
frankness of which he was only capable when he was with her, or was
writing to her.
"I am the dog in the manger," he concluded. "Don't let my growling
distress you. Your happiness has made me envious."
"I'll never believe it," she exclaimed. "You are too good a friend and
too great a man for that. Why can't you be happy, too? Why can't you find
some one?"
"Married life wouldn't suit me. I dislike loneliness yet I couldn't do
without it. In it I find my liberty as an artist."