‘Lazy!’

‘Oh, I’m everything that’s reprehensible.’

‘And you never married?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Aren’t you sure?’

‘As sure as one can be of anything in this doubtful world.’

‘But why didn’t you?’

’Pas si bete.  Marriage is such a bore.  I never met a woman I could bear the thought of passing all my life with.’

‘Conceited!’

’I daresay.  If you like false modesty better, I’ll try to meet your wishes.  What woman would have had a poor devil like me?’

‘Still, marriage is, after all, very much in vogue.’

’Yes, but it’s mad.  Either you must love the woman you marry, or you mustn’t love her.  But if you marry a woman without loving her, I hope you’ll not deny you’re doing a very shocking thing.  If, on the contrary, you do love her, raison de plus for not marrying her Fancy marrying a woman you love; and then, day by day, watching the beautiful wild flower of love fatten into a domestic cabbage!  Isn’t that a syllogism?’

‘You have been in love then?’

‘Never.’

‘Never?’

’Oh, I’ve made a fool of myself occasionally, of course.  But I’ve never been in love.’

‘Except with Helene de la Granjolaye?’

‘Oh, yes, I was in love with her—­when I was ten.’

‘Till you were...?’

‘Till I was...?’

‘How long did it take you to get over it, I mean?’

‘I don’t know.  It wore away gradually.  The tooth of time.’

‘You’re not at all in love with her any more?’

‘After twenty years?  And she a Queen?  I hope I know my place.’

‘But if you were to meet her again?’

‘I should probably suffer a horrible disillusion.’

‘But you have found, at any rate, that “first love is best"?’

‘First and last.  The last shall be first,’ he said oracularly.

‘Don’t you smoke?’ she asked.

’Oh, one by one you drag my vices from me.  Let me own, en bloc, that I have them all.’

‘Then you may light a cigarette and give me one.’

He gave her a cigarette, and held a match while she lit it.  Then he lit one for himself.  Her manner of smoking was leisurely, luxurious.  She inhaled the smoke, and let it escape slowly in a slender spiral.  He looked at her through the thin cloud, and his heart closed in a convulsion.  ’How big and soft and rich—­how magnificent she is—­like some great splendid flower, heavy with sweetness!’ he thought.  He had to breathe deep to overcome a feeling of suffocation; he was trembling in every nerve, and he wondered if she perceived it.  He divined the smooth perfection of her body, through the supple cloth that moulded it; he noticed vaguely that the dress she wore to-day was blue, not black.  He divined the warmth of her round white throat, the perfume of her skin.  ‘And how those lips could kiss!’ his imagination