She brought
to mind sayings of her husband's which apparently showed him more in
sympathy with general opinion, and implied that he approved of it. One
day Clerambault was listening while she read a letter which she had
read to him before. He noticed that she skipped a phrase in which
Mairet expressed his heroic pessimism, and when he remarked on it
she appeared vexed. After this her manner became more distant, her
annoyance passed into coldness, then irritation, till it even grew
into a sort of smothered hostility, and finally she avoided him,
though without an open rupture. Clerambault felt that she had a grudge
against him and that he should see no more of her.
The truth was that, at the same time that Clerambault pursued his
relentless analysis which struck at the foundations of current
beliefs, an inverse process of reconstruction and idealisation was
going on in the mind of Madame Mairet. Her grief longed to convince
itself that after all there had been a holy cause, and the dead man
was no longer there to help her to bear the truth. Where two stand
together there may be joy in the most terrible truths, but when one is
alone they are mortal.
Clerambault understood it all, and his quick sympathies warned him of
the pain he caused and shared; for he made the suffering of this woman
his own.
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