“Yes, carried away,” Giles repeated, understanding madame Vervier more than ever and that the haughtiness was a shield. “And if you were, you’d be helpless, as he was; as all the others are;—and you’d find, I believe, that you couldn’t go back quietly to the things you’d jeopardized.—I mean, they’d have changed; they’d have been spoiled. You made Owen suffer; I’m sure of it. You gave him more suffering than happiness. He lost Toppie through you, and he knew he’d lost her. He couldn’t have lived with Toppie on a lie. The payment may be more than our own suffering; it may be other people’s. That’s what you don’t seem to see.—And as for doing as you like, with yourself and other people, it doesn’t work, the kind of life you lead. I’m sure it doesn’t work. It will spoil you, too. More and more you’ll be battered and bruised;—it’s horrible to think of;—and at last wrecked. Or else so petrified and hardened that nothing can really come to you any more. That’s the way it would happen with anyone like you.” Giles had looked away from her in speaking, but now he lifted his eyes to hers again. “I feel sure of it.” Madame Vervier sat there, her arm lying on the table, her hand holding the stone, and looked fixedly upon him. He had thought of nothing definite, of nothing imminent in speaking. He had been able to speak only because the thought of Toppie had come to him so overmasteringly, arming him with such repudiation of madame Vervier’s philosophy. But now, as she sat silent for so long, he saw suddenly what the fear was that, like a Medusa head, he had held up before her. She was older than André de Valenbois; she loved him passionately; and she was not sure of him. It was in her eyes, in her silence, as she faced him, that Giles read the fear; definite; imminent. And he was horribly sorry for her. “You are a strange young man,” she said at last. The haughtiness was gone. There was no resentment in her voice. She only spoke carefully, as though she felt her way in a world changed to ice. “How can you think you know me well enough to say these things?” “I don’t know you well enough. It’s because we are so near. Through Alix. Through my brother. You’ve made such a difference in my life. Everything is changed for me because of you.” “It need not be as you say,” said madame Vervier, and after her long pause it was as if the strength he had called in question came creeping back into her frozen veins. “Not as you say;—if one has wisdom. One may suffer;—do you imagine that I have not already suffered?—but one need not be wrecked. And I have great wisdom.” “I don’t want you to be wrecked.—You know that,” Giles muttered.