Part 10 (2/2)

Whenever I see one, I follow it. On my word, though, not for her. The fair unknown trotted before me, making the sidewalks echo to the touch of the high heels of her little shoes, while I continued to follow her under the sweet illusion that she would lead me at the end of the journey to a spot where it seemed to me a little of paradise had been scattered. It is thus that phantoms of loved ones course through the streets of Paris in broad daylight, and I am not the only one, Marianne, who has felt the anguish and heart-fluttering that I have experienced.

Often have I found my eyes moist after such an experience; but if it were winter, I attributed my tears simply to a cold. Tell me, Marianne, was it really the cold that moistened my eyes?”

Marianne laughed.

”Come, but you are idyllic, my dear Guy,” said she, looking at Lissac.

”Melancholy, nothing more.”

”Let us say elegiac. Those little fits have come upon you rather late in the day, have they not? A little valerian and quinine, made up into silver-coated pills, is a sovereign remedy.”

”You are making fun of me.”

”No,” she said. ”But it was so easy then, seeing that the recollection of me could inspire you with so many poetic ideas and cause you to trot along for such a distance behind plumed toques--it was so easy not to take the train for Milan and not to fly away from me as one skips from a creditor.”

Guy could not refrain from smiling.

”Ah! it is because--I loved you too dearly!”

”I know that!” exclaimed Marianne with a tone, in contrast with her elegance, of an artist's model giving a pupil a retort. ”A madrigal that has not answered, no; does it rain?”

”I have perhaps been stupid, how can it be helped?” said Lissac.

”Do not doubt it, my dear friend. It is always stupid to deprive one's self of the woman who adores one. Such rarities are not common.”

”You remember, dear Marianne,” said Guy, ”the day when you boldly wrote upon the photographs to some one who loved you dearly: 'To him I love more than every one else in the world?'”

”Yes,” said Marianne, blowing a cloud of smoke upward. ”Such things as that are never forgotten when one writes them with the least sincerity.”

”And you were sincere?”

”On the faith of an honest man,” she answered laughingly.

”And yet I have been a.s.sured since that time, that you adored another before that one.”

”It is possible,” said Marianne with sudden bitterness; ”but, in the life that I have led, I have been so often purchased that I have been more than once able to mistake for love the pleasure that I have derived.”

In those words, uttered sharply, and in a hissing tone like the stroke of a whip-lash in the air, she had expressed so much suffering and hidden anger that Lissac was strangely affected.

Guy, the Parisian, experienced a sentiment altogether curious and unexpected, and this woman whose bare neck was resting on the back of the armchair, allowing the smoke that issued from her lips in puffs to enter her quivering nostrils, seemed to him a new creature, a stranger who had come there to tempt him. In her languis.h.i.+ng and, as it were, abandoned pose, he followed the outline of her graceful body, blooming in its youth, the fulness of her bust, the lines of her skirt closely clinging to her exquisite hips, and the unlooked-for return of the lost mistress, the forgotten one, a.s.sumed in his eyes the relish of a caprice and an adventure. And then, that bitter remark, spoken in the course of their light Parisian gossip, whetted his curiosity still further and awoke, perhaps, all the latent force of a pa.s.sion formerly suddenly severed.

He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young woman's clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that nimbly eluded his grasp. The movement of his hands suggested the embrace that his feelings prompted.

Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for the future:

”Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?”

Lissac smiled.

”Come,” she said, ”nonsense! That is a romance whose pages you have already often turned over.”

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