“It is possible,” said Marianne with sudden bitterness; “but, in the life that I have led, I have been so often purchased that I have been more than once able to mistake for love the pleasure that I have derived.”

In those words, uttered sharply, and in a hissing tone like the stroke of a whip-lash in the air, she had expressed so much suffering and hidden anger that Lissac was strangely affected.

Guy, the Parisian, experienced a sentiment altogether curious and unexpected, and this woman whose bare neck was resting on the back of the armchair, allowing the smoke that issued from her lips in puffs to enter her quivering nostrils, seemed to him a new creature, a stranger who had come there to tempt him.  In her languishing and, as it were, abandoned pose, he followed the outline of her graceful body, blooming in its youth, the fulness of her bust, the lines of her skirt closely clinging to her exquisite hips, and the unlooked-for return of the lost mistress, the forgotten one, assumed in his eyes the relish of a caprice and an adventure.  And then, that bitter remark, spoken in the course of their light Parisian gossip, whetted his curiosity still further and awoke, perhaps, all the latent force of a passion formerly suddenly severed.

He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young woman’s clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that nimbly eluded his grasp.  The movement of his hands suggested the embrace that his feelings prompted.

Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for the future: 

“Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?”

Lissac smiled.

“Come,” she said, “nonsense!  That is a romance whose pages you have already often turned over.”

“The romance of my life,” whispered Lissac in Marianne’s ear.

“The more reason that it should not be read again.  It is true there are books one never reads but once.  And for that reason, probably, one never forgets them.”

She rose abruptly, threw the stump of her cigarette into the fire and looked with a bright, penetrating glance, into Lissac’s surprised eyes.

“Ah! it is a long while, you see, since you spoke laughingly—­we have both heartily laughed at it—­of the ‘caprices of Marianne.’  Do you know what I am, my dear Guy?  Yes, where is the mad creature who was formerly your mistress?  Abandoned to dark, profound and incurable ennui, I yawn my life away, as some one said, I yawn it away even to the point of dislocating my jaw.  The days seem dull to me, people stupid, books insipid, while fools seem idiots and witty people fools.  It is to have the blues, if you will, or rather to have the grays, to hate colorless objects, to be weary of the commonplace, to thirst for the impossible.  A thirst that cannot be allayed, let me add.  The pure, fresh spring that should slake my thirst has not yet gushed.”