passion had by this time grown exclusive; it was, indeed, the passion of a man who has had no youth.  He loved Nana as one who yearned to be her sole possessor, to listen to her, to touch her, to be breathed on by her.  His was now a supersensual tenderness, verging on pure sentiment; it was an anxious affection and as such was jealous of the past and apt at times to dream of a day of redemption and pardon received, when both should kneel before God the Father.  Every day religion kept regaining its influence over him.  He again became a practicing Christian; he confessed himself and communicated, while a ceaseless struggle raged within him, and remorse redoubled the joys of sin and of repentance.  Afterward, when his director gave him leave to spend his passion, he had made a habit of this daily perdition and would redeem the same by ecstasies of faith, which were full of pious humility.  Very naively he offered heaven, by way of expiatory anguish, the abominable torment from which he was suffering.  This torment grew and increased, and he would climb his Calvary with the deep and solemn feelings of a believer, though steeped in a harlot’s fierce sensuality.  That which made his agony most poignant was this woman’s continued faithlessness.  He could not share her with others, nor did he understand her imbecile caprices.  Undying, unchanging love was what he wished for.  However, she had sworn, and he paid her as having done so.  But he felt that she was untruthful, incapable of common fidelity, apt to yield to friends, to stray passers-by, like a good-natured animal, born to live minus a shift.

One morning when he saw Foucarmont emerging from her bedroom at an unusual hour, he made a scene about it.  But in her weariness of his jealousy she grew angry directly.  On several occasions ere that she had behaved rather prettily.  Thus the evening when he surprised her with Georges she was the first to regain her temper and to confess herself in the wrong.  She had loaded him with caresses and dosed him with soft speeches in order to make him swallow the business.  But he had ended by boring her to death with his obstinate refusals to understand the feminine nature, and now she was brutal.

“Very well, yes!  I’ve slept with Foucarmont.  What then?  That’s flattened you out a bit, my little rough, hasn’t it?”

It was the first time she had thrown “my little rough” in his teeth.  The frank directness of her avowal took his breath away, and when he began clenching his fists she marched up to him and looked him full in the face.

“We’ve had enough of this, eh?  If it doesn’t suit you you’ll do me the pleasure of leaving the house.  I don’t want you to go yelling in my place.  Just you get it into your noodle that I mean to be quite free.  When a man pleases me I go to bed with him.  Yes, I do—­that’s my way!  And you must make up your mind directly.  Yes or no!  If it’s no, out you may walk!”