She got up, but he seized her hands.  “Only one word, Gabrielle.  Tell me the truth!”

“I have just told you.  I never have dishonored you.”

He looked her full in the face, and how beautiful she was, with her gray eyes, like the cold sky.  In her dark hair sparkled the diamond coronet, like a radiance.  He suddenly felt, felt by a kind of intuition, that this grand creature was not merely a being destined to perpetuate the race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty.  There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living statue that brightens our life.

Her husband remained standing before her, stupefied at his tardy and obscure discovery, confusedly hitting on the cause of his former jealousy and understanding it all very imperfectly, and at last lie said:  “I believe you, for I feel at this moment that you are not lying, and before I really thought that you were.”

She put out her hand to him:  “We are friends then?”

He took her hand and kissed it and replied:  “We are friends.  Thank you,
Gabrielle.”

Then he went out, still looking at her, and surprised that she was still so beautiful and feeling a strange emotion arising in him.

THE FATHER

I

He was a clerk in the Bureau of Public Education and lived at Batignolles.  He took the omnibus to Paris every morning and always sat opposite a girl, with whom he fell in love.

She was employed in a shop and went in at the same time every day.  She was a little brunette, one of those girls whose eyes are so dark that they look like black spots, on a complexion like ivory.  He always saw her coming at the corner of the same street, and she generally had to run to catch the heavy vehicle, and sprang upon the steps before the horses had quite stopped.  Then she got inside, out of breath, and, sitting down, looked round her.

The first time that he saw her, Francois Tessier liked the face.  One sometimes meets a woman whom one longs to clasp in one’s arms without even knowing her.  That girl seemed to respond to some chord in his being, to that sort of ideal of love which one cherishes in the depths of the heart, without knowing it.

He looked at her intently, not meaning to be rude, and she became embarrassed and blushed.  He noticed it, and tried to turn away his eyes; but he involuntarily fixed them upon her again every moment, although he tried to look in another direction; and, in a few days, they seemed to know each other without having spoken.  He gave up his place to her when the omnibus was full, and got outside, though he was very sorry to do it.  By this time she had got so far as to greet him with a little smile; and, although she always dropped her eyes under his looks, which she felt were too ardent, yet she did not appear offended at being looked at in such a manner.