Then younger desires destroyed the old, and gallant adventures begot one another.  It is all over with this one and that one whom I adored.  When I see them again, I wonder that I can say, at one and the same time, of a being who has not changed, “How I loved her!” and, “How I have ceased to love her!”

All the while performing as a duty my daily task, all the while taking suitable precautions so that Marie may not know and may not suffer, I am looking for the happiness which lives.  And truly, when I have a sense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on the way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal to everything!

This fills my life.  Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears it.  All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared.  When they say in my presence of some young woman that, “she is not happy,” a thrill of joy tears through me.

On Sundays, among the crowds, I have often felt my heart tighten with distress as I watch the unknown women.  Reverie has often held me all day because of one who has gone by and disappeared, leaving me a clear vision of her curtained room, and of herself, vibrating like a harp.  She, perhaps, was the one I should have always loved; she whom I seek gropingly, desperately, from each to the next.  Ah, what a delightful thing to see and to think of a distant woman always is, whoever she may be!

There are moments when I suffer, and am to be pitied.  Assuredly, if one could read me really, no one would pity me.  And yet all men are like me.  If they are gifted with acceptable physique they dream of headlong adventures, they attempt them, and our heart never stands still.  But no one acknowledges that, no one, ever.

Then, there were the women who turned me a cold shoulder; and among them all Madame Pierron, a beautiful and genteel woman of twenty-five years, with her black fillets and her marble profile, who still retained the obvious awkwardness and vacant eye of young married women.  Tranquil, staid and silent, she came and went and lived, totally blind to my looks of admiration.

This perfect unconcern aggravated my passion.  I remember my pangs one morning in June, when I saw some feminine linen spread upon the green hedge within her garden.  The delicate white things marshaled there were waiting, stirred by the leaves and the breeze; so that Spring lent them frail shape and sweetness—­and life.  I remember, too, a gaunt house, scorching in the sun, and a window which flashed and then shut!  The window stayed shut, like a slab.  All the world was silent; and that splendid living being was walled up there.  And last, I have recollection of an evening when, in the bluish and dark green and chalky landscape of the town and its rounded gardens, I saw that window lighted up.  A narrow glimmer of rose and gold was enframed there, and I could distinguish, leaning on the sill that overhung the town, in the