“Ah,” she said. “Vous m’avez blessée d’amour”—ironically.
“Yes, speak French, it helps women like you at such moments,” he said, brutally, and kissed her.
But kissing him back, she thought, “The fool, why does Oscar take her so seriously when they are both children, and she is torturing him.”
“My love, my sweet, my little love,” he was babbling.
She tried to quench this, trembling a little. “But tell me, my friend—no, not so hasty—what do you think of immortality?” He had pushed her so far back that there was no regaining her composure. “My God, in other words, what of the will to retribution!”
But she could not go on. “I’ve tried to,” she thought.
Later, when the dawn was almost upon them, he said: “How sad to be drunk, only to die. For the end of all man is Fate, in other words, the end of all man is vulgar.”
She felt the need of something that had not been.
“I’m not God, you see, after all.”
“So I see, madam,” he said. “But you’re a damned clever little woman.”