Marie never shows any jealousy, nor even suspicion about my personal adventures.  Her trust is almost excessive!  She is not very far-seeing, or else I am nothing very much to her, and I have a grudge against her for this indifference.

And now I see around me women who are too young to love me.  That most positive of obstacles, the age difference, begins to separate me from the amorous.  And yet I am not surfeited with love, and I yearn towards youth!  Marthe, my little sister-in-law, said to me one day, “Now that you’re old——­” That a child of fifteen years, so freshly dawned and really new, can bring herself to pass this artless judgment on a man of thirty-five—­that is fate’s first warning, the first sad day which tells us at midsummer that winter will come.

One evening, as I entered the room, I indistinctly saw Marie, sitting and musing by the window.  As I came in she got up—­it was Marthe!  The light from the sky, pale as a dawn, had blenched the young girl’s golden hair and turned the trace of a smile on her cheek into something like a wrinkle.  Cruelly, the play of the light showed her face faded and her neck flabby; and because she had been yawning, even her eyes were watery, and for some seconds the lids were sunk and reddened.

The resemblance of the two sisters tortured me.  This little Marthe, with her luxurious and appetizing color, her warm pink cheeks and moist lips; this plump adolescent whose short skirt shows her curving calves, is an affecting picture of what Marie was.  It is a sort of terrible revelation.  In truth Marthe resembles, more than the Marie of to-day does, the Marie whom I formerly loved; the Marie who came out of the unknown, whom I saw one evening sitting on the rose-tree seat, shining, silent—­in the presence of love.

It required a great effort on my part not to try, weakly and vainly, to approach Marthe—­the impossible dream, the dream of dreams!  She has a little love affair with a youngster hardly molted into adolescence, and rather absurd, whom one catches sight of now and again as he slips away from her side; and that day when she sang so much in spite of herself, it was because a little rival was ill.  I am as much a stranger to her girlish growing triumph and to her thoughts as if I were her enemy!  One morning when she was capering and laughing, flower-crowned, at the doorstep, she looked to me like a being from another world.

* * * * * *

One winter’s day, when Marie had gone out and I was arranging my papers, I found a letter I had written not long before, but had not posted, and I threw the useless document on the fire.  When Marie came back in the evening, she settled herself in front of the fire to dry herself, and to revive it for the room’s twilight; and the letter, which had been only in part consumed, took fire again.  And suddenly there gleamed in the night a shred of paper with a shred of my writing—­“I love you as much as you love me!”