She did not answer his last remark for a little while.  She sat looking before her, overwhelmed, it seemed, by an inward rush of images and sensations.  Till, with a sudden movement, she turned to him and said, smiling, quite in her ordinary voice: 

“Do you know why I shall never be happy?  It is because I have such a bad temper.”

“Have you?” said Ashe, smiling.

She gave him a curious look.

“You don’t believe it?  If you had been in the convent, you would have believed it.  I’m mad sometimes—­quite mad; with pride, I suppose, and vanity.  The Soeurs said it was that.”

“They had to explain it somehow,” said Ashe.  “But I am quite sure that if I lived in a convent I should have a furious temper.”

“You!” she said, half contemptuously.  “You couldn’t be ill-tempered anywhere.  That’s the one thing I don’t like about you—­you’re too calm—­too—­too satisfied.  It’s—­Well! you said a sharp thing to me, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t say one to you.  You shouldn’t look as though you enjoyed your life so much.  It’s bourgeois!  It is, indeed.”  And she frowned upon him with a little extravagant air that amused him.

By some prescience, she had put on that morning a black dress of thin material, made with extreme simplicity.  No flounces, no fanfaronnade.  A little girlish dress, that made the girlish figure seem even frailer and lighter than he remembered it the night before in the splendors of her Paris gown.  Her large black hat emphasized the whiteness of her brow, the brilliance of her most beautiful eyes; and then all the rest was insubstantial sprite and airy nothing, to be crushed in one hand.  And yet what untamed, indomitable things breathed from it—­a self surely more self, more intensely, obstinately alive than any he had yet known.

Her attack had brought the involuntary blood to his cheeks, which annoyed him.  But he invited her to say why cheerfulness was a vice.  She replied that no one should look success—­as much as he did.

“And you scorn success?”

“Scorn it!” She drew a long breath, clasped both her hands above her head, then slowly let the thin arms fall again.  “Scorn it!  What nonsense!  But everybody who hasn’t got it hates those who have.”

“Don’t hate me!” said Ashe, quickly.

“Yes,” she said, with stubbornness, “I must.  Do you know why I was such a wild-cat at school?  Because some of the other girls were more important than I—­much more important—­and richer—­and more beautiful—­and people paid them more attention.  And that seemed to burn the heart in me.”  She pressed her hands to her breast with a passionate gesture.  “You know the French word panache?  Well, that’s what I care for —­that’s what I adore!  To be the first—­the best—­the most distinguished.  To be envied—­and pointed at—­obeyed when I lift my finger—­and then to come to some great, glorious, tragic end!”