Therese closed the book and thought that these ideas were only the dreams of novelists who did not know life.  She knew very well that there was in reality neither a Carmel of passion nor a chain of love, nor a beautiful and terrible vocation against which the predestined one resisted in vain; she knew very well that love was only a brief intoxication from which one recovered a little sadder.  And yet, perhaps, she did not know everything; perhaps there were loves in which one was deliciously lost.  She put out her lamp.  The dreams of her first youth came back to her.

CHAPTER VI

A DISTINGUISHED RELICT

It was raining.  Madame Martin-Belleme saw confusedly through the glass of her coupe the multitude of passing umbrellas, like black turtles under the watery skies.  She was thinking.  Her thoughts were gray and indistinct, like the aspect of the streets and the squares.

She no longer knew why the idea had come to her to spend a month with Miss Bell.  Truly, she never had known.  The idea had been like a spring, at first hidden by leaves, and now forming the current of a deep and rapid stream.  She remembered that Tuesday night at dinner she had said suddenly that she wished to go, but she could not remember the first flush of that desire.  It was not the wish to act toward Robert Le Menil as he was acting toward her.  Doubtless she thought it excellent to go travelling in Italy while he went fox-hunting.  This seemed to her a fair arrangement.  Robert, who was always pleased to see her when he came back, would not find her on his return.  She thought this would be right.  She had not thought of it at first.  And since then she had thought little of it, and really she was not going for the pleasure of making him grieve.  She had against him a thought less piquant, and more harsh.  She did not wish to see him soon.  He had become to her almost a stranger.  He seemed to her a man like others—­better than most others—­good-looking, estimable, and who did not displease her; but he did not preoccupy her.  Suddenly he had gone out of her life.  She could not remember how he had become mingled with it.  The idea of belonging to him shocked her.  The thought that they might meet again in the small apartment of the Rue Spontini was so painful to her that she discarded it at once.  She preferred to think that an unforeseen event would prevent their meeting again—­the end of the world, for example.  M. Lagrange, member of the Academie des Sciences, had told her the day before of a comet which some day might meet the earth, envelop it with its flaming hair, imbue animals and plants with unknown poisons, and make all men die in a frenzy of laughter.  She expected that this, or something else, would happen next month.  It was not inexplicable that she wished to go.  But that her desire to go should contain a vague joy, that she should feel the charm of what she was to find, was inexplicable to her.