A BAROQUE AFFAIR
247
some of the evening might be salvaged by a last-minute gaiety, and,
with an abrupt shift of her whole sensibility, she turned against her
own pride, in what seemed an easy retreat to self-abasement. Trying
to pretend that nothing had happened between Craven and herself,
she was inspired again by her earlier mood of serious responsive
charm. She started talking about Pascal again, not this time about
the Jansenists, but of Pascal's remarks on birthdays and age. This
was a poor choice, like a child idly throwing a stone and discovering
the Lascaux caves; for, it made Craven reflect again on the differ–
ence between his own age and Lucy's, and on his wasted youth, his
dark, irregular, unpromising future.
Even Lucy could sense something sickening in this bright con–
versation. She was making herself hateful: he hated her more, while
she didn't like
him
any less, but the indifference and disgust he showed
her now lent him a greater charm than he had before. Craven saw
only that she was rather shallow, that he had made a mistake about
her. Young girls, it seemed, even with all their guilt, were more
resilient than he could ever be, or perhaps more dissociated, more,
urn.... These thoughts were dangerous, they led so quickly to the
heart of Donald Craven's previous interest in Lucy, and to his own
despair, that he managed to get rid of her immediately. Without
taking her home.
For a whole week Lucy couldn't follow anything but the
f,lfO–
tesque argument in her own heart. The poor girl strained to make
sense of herself, and, for her, that was the point of the crisis. All
she could hear were these terrible arguments, noble tragic dialogues
of love and duty, passion and honor, feeling and scruple, dialogues
in which the issue would always be a destruction she could not under–
stand. For nothing was clear,
all
was murky, dark, cold, and hate–
ful. Lucy had always been able to explain herself before, but now
nothing worked and nothing had changed. She was just then rather
involved with Louis Meyer, and now all that seemed "impossible"–
but also she didn't want to
not
see Louis. Lucy was not especially
attracted to Donald Craven-still, this seemed an inadequate reason.
She never expected such a man to be attractive in that way. He
did engage her nerves, if not her emotions, but she could not think
that sufficient. What she wanted would not correspond with her
emotion, what she could do was not what she wanted. She sat,
