She was not drugged so there would be no scene, he saw relieved. "When are you leaving?" he asked gently, pretending not to notice the complaint.
"Next week in the Berengaria."
"You'll be glad to get back to Paris."
"I have had an offer of a Broadway revue. Jacques believes I should accept but I do not think so."
She was asking him to decide. "After all, it's for you to decide." "Naturally, but Jacques refuses to leave," she said, her eyes filling at Paul's callousness too.
"That will make it difficult for you."
"Not at all. I shall be glad to change. There are other accompanists. His long face was getting on my nerves."
"That is unkind."
"A reproach of unkindness does not come well from you," she said tartly.
"Simone, I don't know how to say it. Even if I knew how, it wouldn't be an explanation. It is my feeling, as you have your feeling. Thus anything I say will seem without feeling. But it isn't so. I know what you have meant—and mean—to me. Words would never tell you that. It's that we have—or rather that I have—got between ourselves. It's that—I need to be alone."
She knew that at last it was over and, closing her eyes, wished she were in the black womb of an empty nave kneeling on hard dark stone weeping herself dry. That was the best way to sing, when one had no feeling left. If only that day soon would come releasing her to peaceful middle-age, content with singing and past all love of this man.
"Never mind," she said harshly, "I am not yet a corpse. You will come to see me if you come to Paris?"
"Yes."
They stood wordlessly.
How could one love and then not love? Or rather not love as he had, the best feeling for another human being he had had in his life. The memory of it was still present, but not the feeling. It always would be part of him. But her feeling for him had changed too. She no longer wanted the easiness and sharing they first had had, but someone to cling to who would keep on exorcising her obsession about age, someone who had no other life but hers.
He could not but admire the manner in which she drew on her theatre training to regain composure.
