"I should hardly have thought so," said Delarey.
"Nor I," said Hermione. "I simply don't believe it's possible. For a
moment, yes, perhaps. But you say, Emile, that there's an actual breach
between them."
"There is certainly. Have you ever made any study of jealousy in its
various forms?"
"Never. I don't know what jealousy is. I can't understand it."
"Yet you must be capable of it."
"You think every one is?"
"Very few who are really alive in the spirit are not. And you, I am
certain, are."
Hermione laughed, an honest, gay laugh, that rang out wholesomely in the
narrow room.
"I doubt it, Emile. Perhaps I'm too conceited. For instance, if I cared
for some one and was cared for--"
"And the caring of the other ceased, because he had only a certain,
limited faculty of affection and transferred his affection
elsewhere--what then?"
"I've so much pride, proper or improper, that I believe my affection
would die. My love subsists on sympathy--take that food from it and it
would starve and cease to live. I give, but when giving I always ask. If
I were to be refused I couldn't give any more. And without the love there
could be no jealousy. But that isn't the point, Emile."
He smiled.
"What is?"
"The point is--can a noble nature lapse like that from its nobility?"
"Yes, it can."
"Then it changes, it ceases to be noble. You would not say that a brave
man can show cowardice and remain a brave man."
"I would say that a man whose real nature was brave, might, under certain
circumstances, show fear, without being what is called a coward. Human
nature is full of extraordinary possibilities, good and evil, of
extraordinary contradictions. But this point I will concede you, that it
is like the boomerang, which flies forward, circles, and returns to the
point from which it started. The inherently noble nature will, because it
must, return eventually to its nobility. Then comes the really tragic
moment with the passion of remorse."
He spoke quietly, almost coldly. Hermione looked at him with shining
eyes. She had quite forgotten Madame Lagrande and Robert Meunier, had
lost the sense of the special in her love of the general.
"That's a grand theory," she said. "That we must come back to the good
that is in us in the end, that we must be true to that somehow, almost
whether we will or no. I shall try to think of that when I am sinning."