Thus did his reflection lead him till the end of the Gospel, and when he said the Deo gratias he had as yet decided nothing.

LXXVI.

AWAKENING.

“We never permit with impunity the mind to analyze the liberty to indulge in certain loves; once begin to reflect on those deep and troublesome matters which are called passion and duty, the soul which naturally delights in the investigation of every truth, is unable to stop in its exploration.”

  ERNEST FRYDEAU (La Comtesse de Chalis).

When Marcel had gone away, Suzanne, when she had quietly shut the street-door, by which she had gone out, went upstairs to her room and sat down on the side of her bed.

She asked herself if she had not just been the sport of an hallucination, if it was really true that a man had gone out of the house, who had held her in his arms, to whom she had yielded herself.

Everything had happened so rapidly, that she had had no time to think, to reflect, to say to herself:  “What does he want with me?” no time even to recover herself.

A kiss, a violent emotion, a transient indignation, a struggle for a few seconds, a sharp pain, and that was all; the crime was consummated, she had lost her honour, and that was love!

She wished not to believe it, but her disordered corsage, her dishevelled hair upon her bare shoulders, her crumpled dressing-gown, and more than all that, the violent leaping of her heart, told her that she was not dreaming.

He was gone, the priest; he had fled away into the night, happy and light of heart, leaving her alone with her shame, and the ulcer of remorse in her soul.

And then big tears rolled down her cheeks and fell upon her breasts, still burning with his feverish caresses.  “It is all over! it is all over.  Where is my virginity?”

Weep, poor girl, weep, for that virginity is already far away, and nothing, it is said, flees faster than the illusion which departs, if it be not a virginity which flies away.

And a vague terror was mingled with her remorse.

The first apprehension which strikes brutally against the edifice of illusions of the woman who has committed a fault, is the anxiety regarding the opinion of the man who has incited her to that fault; I am speaking, be it understood, of one in whom there remains the feeling of modesty, without which she is not a woman, but an unclean female.

When she awakes from her short delirium, she says to herself: 

—­What will he think of me?  What will he believe?  Will he not despise me?

And she has good grounds for apprehension; for often (I believe I have said so already) the contempt of her accomplice is all that remains to her.