Any other than Dorsenne would not have admitted such an idea without being inspired with horror.  But Dorsenne, on the contrary, suddenly began to dive into that sinister hypothesis, to help it forward, to justify it.  No one more than he suffered from a moral deformity which the abuse of a certain literary work inflicts on some writers.  They are so much accustomed to combining artificial characters with creations of their imaginations that they constantly fulfil an analogous need with regard to the individuals they know best.  They have some friend who is dear to them, whom they see almost daily, who hides nothing from them and from whom they hide nothing.  But if they speak to you of him you are surprised to find that, while continuing to love that friend, they trace to you in him two contradictory portraits with the same sincerity and the same probability.

They have a mistress, and that woman, even in the space sometimes of one day, sees them, with fear, change toward her, who has remained the same.  It is that they have developed in them to a very intense degree the imagination of the human soul, and that to observe is to them only a pretext to construe.  That infirmity had governed Julien from early maturity.  It was rarely manifested in a manner more unexpected than in the case of charming Alba Steno, who was possibly dreaming of him at the very moment when, in the silence of the night, he was forcing himself to prove that she was capable of that species of epistolary parricide.

“After all,” he said to himself, for there is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength, “after all, have I really understood her relations toward her mother?  When I came to Rome in November, when I was to be presented to the Countess, what did not only one, but nine or ten persons tell me?  That Madame Steno had a liaison with the husband of her daughter’s best friend, and that the little one was grieving about it.  I went to the house.  I saw the child.  She was sad that evening.  I had the curiosity to wish to read her heart....  It is six months since then.  We have met almost daily, often twice a day.  She is so hermetically sealed that I am no farther advanced than I was on the first day.  I have seen her glance at her mother as she did this morning, with loving, admiring eyes.  I have seen her turn pale at a word, a gesture, on her part.  I have seen her embrace Maud Gorka, and play tennis with that same friend so gayly, so innocently.  I have seen that she could not bear the presence of Maitland in a room, and yet she asked the American to take her portrait....  Is she guileless?....  Is she a hypocrite?  Or is she tormented by doubt-divining, not divining-believing, not believing in-her mother?  Is she underhand in any case, with her eyes the color of the sea?  Has she the ambiguous mind at once of a Russian and an Italian?....  This would be