ding Anatole France
recently and the lady of _Le Lys Rouge_ came into his thoughts. There
was something in common between Lady Harman and the Countess Martin,
they were tall and dark and dignified, and Lady Harman was one of those
rare women who could have carried the magnificent name of Therese. And
there in the setting of Paris and Florence was a whole microcosm of
love, real but illicit, carried out as it were secretly and tactfully,
beneath the great shadow of the cliff. But he found it difficult to
imagine Lady Harman in that. Or Sir Isaac playing Count Martin's
part....

How different were those Frenchwomen, with their afternoons vacant
except for love, their detachment, their lovers, those secret,
convenient, romantically furnished flats, that compact explicit business
of _l'amour_! He had indeed some moments of regret that Lady Harman
wouldn't go into that picture. She was different--if only in her
simplicity. There was something about these others that put them whole
worlds apart from her, who was held so tethered from all furtive
adventure by her filmy tentacles of responsibility, her ties and strands
of relationship, her essential delicacy. That momentary vision of Ellen
as the Countess Martin broke up into absurdities directly he looked at
it fully and steadfastly. From thinking of the two women as similar
types he passed into thinking of them as opposites; Therese, hard,
clear, sensuous, secretive, trained by a brilliant tradition in the
technique of connubial betrayal, was the very antithesis of Ellen's
vague but invincible veracity and openness. Not for nothing had Anatole
France made his heroine the daughter of a grasping financial
adventurer....

Of course the cave is a part of the mountain....

His mind drifted away to still more general speculations, and always he
was trying not to see the figure of Sir Isaac, grimly and yet meanly
resolute--in possession. Always too like some open-mouthed yokel at a
fair who knows nothing of the insult chalked upon his back, he
disregarded how he himself coveted and desired and would if he could
have gripped. He forgot his own watchful attention to Euphemia in the
past, nor did he think what he might have been if Lady Harman had been
his wife. It needed the chill veracities of the small hours to bring him
to that. He thought now of crude egotism as having Sir Isaac's hands and
Sir Isaac's eyes and Sir Isaac's position. He forgot any egotism he
himself was betrayi