Climates by André Maurois

less?”
    Her face hardened, inscrutable. “I never said that.”
    “You didn’t say it, but I’m asking it of you … What difference would it make to you? It would make
me
happy. And you yourself have said you’re indifferent to him …”
    She seemed taken aback, lost in thought, then she said with an embarrassed smile, “I don’t know, Dickie, I don’t think I can do things differently … I’m having fun.”
    Poor Odile! She seemed so puerile and so sincere as she said that. I then showed her, with my implacable but pointless logic, that it would be easy to “do things differently.”
    “Your downfall,” I told her, “is that you accept yourself as you are, as if we were given our characters ready-made. But we can shape our characters, we can alter them …”
    “Well, alter yours, then.”
    “I’m completely prepared to try. But you could help me by trying too.”
    “No, I’ve already told you plenty of times that I can’t. And anyway I don’t want to try.”
    When I think of those now long gone days, I wonder whether she had some deep-seated instinct dictating this attitude. If she had changed in the way I was asking her to, would I have carried on loving her so much? Would I have tolerated the constant presence of that futile little creature, if scenes like that had not made it impossible for either of us to be bored? Besides, it was not true that she had never tried. Odile was not unkind. When she could see I was unhappy, she believed she would go to any lengths to make things better for me, but her prideand weakness were stronger than her goodness, and her life stayed the same.
    I had come to recognize what I called her “air of triumph,” a heightened cheerfulness, a semitone above the usual, brighter eyes, a more beautiful expression, and her customary languor overcome. When she liked a man, I knew before she did. It was appalling … Sometimes this made me think of the phrase she quoted in Florence: “I am too fond, and therefore thou mayst think my behavior light.”
    What saddens me most when I reflect on that unfortunate period, as I still often do, is the thought that, despite her flirtatiousness, Odile was faithful to me and that, with a little more aptitude, I might have been able to keep her love. But it was not easy knowing how to react with Odile. She found tenderness boring and it produced snappy, hostile reactions in her, whereas threats would have made her determined to take drastic action.
    One of her most unwavering characteristics was her love of danger. She liked nothing better than being taken out in a yacht in stormy winds, driving a racing car around a tricky circuit, or jumping unnecessarily high obstacles on horseback. A whole band of bracing young men circled around her. Butnone of them was preferred over the others, and whenever I had an opportunity to hear their conversations, I felt the tone of Odile’s niceties was of the companionable, sporting kind. In fact I am now in possession (I will explain why) of a number of letters these boys wrote to Odile; they all prove that she tolerated a certain amorous banter but had not succumbed to any of them.
    “Strange Odile,” one of them wrote, “so wild and yet so chaste; too chaste for my liking.” And another, a sentimental, religious young Englishman, said, “As it is clear, my dear Odile, that I can never have you in this world, I hope to be close to you in the next.” But I am now telling you things I knew only much later and, at the time itself, I could not believe that this free way of life was innocent.
    In order to be quite fair to her, I should also add a detail I have been forgetting. Early on in our marriage she had tried to involve me with her friends, old and new; she would happily have shared all her friends with me. We met the Englishman I mentioned during our first summer vacation, in Biarritz. He entertained Odile by teaching her the banjo, which was a new instrument at the time, and by