which she would not be able to free herself.  Already, five or six months before, this question of long hair and beard had been agitated between them.  As he complained one day of the bourgeois who would not come to him, she gently explained to him that to please and attract these bourgeois it was, perhaps, not quite well to astonish those whom one does not shock.  That overcoats less long, hats with less brim, and hair and beard shorter; in fact, a general appearance that more nearly approached their own, would be, perhaps, more agreeable.  He became angry, and replied plainly that such concessions were not in keeping with his character.  How could he now abruptly make these concessions, and at a time when his success at the examinations placed him above such small compromises?  He resisted when he needed help, and when a patient was an affair of life or death to him; he yielded when he had need of no one, and when he did not care for patients.  The contradiction was truly too strong, and such that it could not but strike Phillis, whose attention had already had only too much to arouse it.

And yet, as dangerous as it was to come to the decision to make himself unrecognizable, it would be madness on his part to draw back; the sooner the better.  His fault had been in not foreseeing, the day after Caffie’s death, that circumstances might arise sooner or later which would force it upon him.  At that moment it did not present the same dangers as now; but parting from the idea that he had not been seen by any one, that he could not have been seen, he had rejoiced in the security that this conviction gave him, and quietly become benumbed.

The awakening had come; with his eyes open he saw the abyss to the edge of which his stupidity had brought him.

How strong would he not be if during the last three months he had not had this long hair and beard, which was most terrible testimony against him?  Instead of taking refuge in miserable makeshifts when Phillis and Nougarede asked him to see Madame Dammauville, he would have boldly held his own, and have gone to see her as they wished.  In that case he would be saved, and soon Florentin would be also.

And he believed himself intelligent!  And he proudly imagined he could arrange things beforehand so well that he would never be surprised!  What he should have foreseen would come to pass, nothing more; the lesson that experience taught him was hard, and this was not the first one; the evening of Caffie’s death he saw very clearly that a new situation opened before him, which to the end of his life would make him the prisoner of his crime.  To tell the truth, however, this impression became faint soon enough; but now it was stronger than ever, and to a certainty, never to be dismissed again.

But it was useless to look behind; it was the present and the future that he must measure with a clear and firm glance, if he did not wish to be lost.

After carefully examining and weighing the question, he decided to have his hair and beard cut.  However adventurous this resolution was, however embarrassing it might become in provoking curiosity and questions, it was the only way of escaping a possible recognition.