PART VII

I did not choose to wait until she woke up, I sprang from the bed, where Elaine was still sleeping, with her disheveled hair lying on the lace-edged pillows.  Her complexion was almost transparent, her lips were half open, as if she were dreaming, and she seemed so overcome with sleep, that I felt much emotion when I looked at her.

I drank four glasses of mild champagne, one after the other, as quickly as I could, but it did not quench my thirst.  I was feverish and would have given anything in the world for something to interest me suddenly and have absorbed me and lifted me out of that slough in which my heart and my brain were being engulfed, as if in a quicksand.  I did not venture to avow to myself what was making me so dejected, what was torturing me and driving me mad with grief, or to scrutinize the muddy bottom of my present thoughts sincerely and courageously, to question myself and to pull myself together.

It would have been so odious, so infamous, to harbor such suspicions unjustly, to accuse that adorable creature who was not yet twenty, whom I loved, and who seemed to love me, without having certain proofs, that I felt that I was blushing at the idea that I had any doubt of her innocence.  Ah!  Why did I marry?

I had a sufficient income to enable me to live as I liked, to pay beautiful women who pleased me, whom I chanced to meet, and who amused me, and who sometimes gave me unexpected proofs of affection, but I had never allowed myself to be caught altogether, and in order to keep my heart warm, I had some romantic and sentimental friendships with women in society, some of those delightful flirtations which have an appearance of love, which fill up the idleness of a useless life with a number of unexpected sensations, with small duties and vague subtle pleasures!

And was I now going to be like one of those ships which an unskillful turn of the helm runs ashore as it is leaving the harbor?  What terrible trials were awaiting me, what sorrows and what struggles?

A chaffing friend said to me one night in joke at the club, when I had just broken one of those banks, which form an epoch in a player’s life: 

“If I were in your place, Jacques, I should distrust such runs of luck as that, for one always has to pay for them sooner or later!”

Sooner or later!

I half opened the bedroom door gently.  Elaine was in one of those heavy sleeps that follow intoxication.  Who could tell whether, when she opened her eyes and called me, surprised at not finding herself in my arms, her whole being would not become languid, and suddenly sink into a state of prostration?  I wanted to reason with myself, and bring myself face to face with those cursed suggestions, as one does with a skittish horse before some object that frightens it, and to evoke the recollection of every hour, every minute of that first night of love, and to extract the secret from her....