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The old man did not look into Jacques de Wissant's face while he uttered the comforting words. He had become aware of many things including Madeleine Baudoin's cruise in the Neptune the day before the accident, and of her own and Claire de Wissant's reported departure for Italy.
Reserved and cold in manner; proud, with an intense but never openly expressed pride in his name and of what the bearers of it had achieved for their country; obstinate and narrow as are apt to be all human beings whose judgment is never questioned by those about them, Jacques de Wissant's fetish was his personal honour and the honour of his name of the name of Wissant.
He shook his head with a pained, angry gesture "I understand what happened," he said at last. "The woman was of course poor Dupré's" and then something in Jacques de Wissant's pallid face made him substitute, for the plain word he meant to have used, a softer, kindlier phrase "poor Dupré's bonne amie," he said. "I am advised not," said Jacques de Wissant shortly.
But he had had the same opinion of the Neptune, one of the two submarines which were out this fine August morning.... An eager "Bonjour, madame," suddenly sounded in Claire de Wissant's ear, and she turned quickly to find one of the younger officers at her elbow. "The Neptune is a few minutes late," he said smiling. "I hope your sister has enjoyed her cruise!"
"No, no," she cried, "that can't be it's impossible!" "Command yourself!" he said sternly. "Remember what would be thought by anyone who saw you in this state." But she went on looking at him with wild, terror-stricken eyes. "My poor Claire!" she moaned. "My little sister Claire " All Jacques de Wissant's jealousy leapt into eager, quivering life. Then he had been right after all?
Such was Jacques de Wissant's simple, cynical philosophy concerning a subject to which he had never given much thought.
She gazed at him, past him, with widely open eyes, as if she were staring, fascinated, at some scene of unutterable horror and there crept into Jacques de Wissant's mind a thought so full of shameful dread that he thrust it violently from him.
At the time he had thought her betrayal of feeling very unreasonable, but now he understood, and even shared to a certain extent, the pain she had shown; but then he knew Dupré, knew and liked him, and the men immured in the Neptune were men of Falaise. These were the thoughts which jostled each other in Jacques de Wissant's brain as he sat back in the Admiral's car.
From the first it had seemed peculiar, to Jacques de Wissant's mind unnatural, that such a man as was Dupré should be so keenly interested in music and in modern literature. But so it was, and it had been owing to these strange, untoward tastes that Commander Dupré and Claire had become friends.
Jacques de Wissant's lantern-jawed, expressionless face quickened into feeling as he thought of his two little girls. They were the pride, as well as the only vivid pleasure, of his life. All that he dispassionately admired in his wife was, so he sometimes told himself with satisfaction, repeated in his daughters.
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