We formed ourselves round her in a ring of fire, hoping to frighten the beast away.  But we were miserably, fiercely, anxious, suspicious, jealous.  We were jealous of everything in the shape of a man that came into any sort of contact with her:  of the men who passed her in the street or rode with her in the omnibus; of the little employes de commerce to whom she gave English lessons; of everybody.  I fancy we were always more or less uneasy in our minds when she was out of our sight.  Who could tell what might be happening?  With those lips of hers, those eyes of hers—­oh, we knew how she could love:  Chalks had said it.  Who could tell what might already have happened?  Who could tell that the coming man had not already come?  She was entirely capable of concealing him from us.  Sometimes, in the evening, she would seem absent, preoccupied.  How could we be sure that she wasn’t thinking of him?  Savouring anew the hours she had passed with him that very day?  Or dreaming of those she had promised him for to-morrow?  If she took leave of us—­might he not be waiting to join her round the corner?  If she spent an evening away from us....

And she—­she only laughed; laughed at our jealousy, our fears, our precautions, as she laughed at our hankering flame.  Not a laugh that reassured us, though; an inscrutable, enigmatic laugh, that might have covered a multitude of sins.  She had taken to calling us collectively Loulou.  ‘Ah, le pauv’ Loulou—­so now he has the pretension to be jealous.’  Then she would be interrupted by a paroxysm of laughter; after which, ‘Oh, qu’il est drole,’ she would gasp.  ’Pourvu qu’il ne devienne pas genant!’

It was all very well to laugh; but some of us, our personal equation quite apart, could not help feeling that the joke was of a precarious quality, that the situation held tragic possibilities.  A young and attractive girl, by no means constitutionally insusceptible, and imbued with heterodox ideas of marriage—­alone in the Latin Quarter.

X.

I have heard it maintained that the man has yet to be born, who, in his heart of hearts, if he comes to think the matter over, won’t find himself at something of a loss to conceive why any given woman should experience the passion of love for any other man; that a woman’s choice, to all men save the chosen, is, by its very nature, as incomprehensible as the postulates of Hegel.  But, in Nina’s case, even when I regard it from this distance of time, I still feel, as we all felt then, that the mystery was more than ordinarily obscure.  We had fancied ourselves prepared for anything; the only thing we weren’t prepared for was the thing that befell.  We had expected ‘him’ to be offensive, and he wasn’t.  He was, quite simply, insignificant.  He was a South American, a Brazilian, a member of the School of Mines:  a poor, undersized, pale, spiritless, apologetic creature, with rather a Teutonic-looking name, Ernest Mayer.