She extended her arms to him.  “Listen to me, Jacques.”  He motioned to her that it was useless for her to speak.  Yet he wished to listen to her, and already he was listening with avidity.  He detested and rejected in advance what she would say, but nothing else in the world interested him.

She said: 

“You may have believed I was betraying you, that I was not living for you alone.  But can you not understand anything?  You do not see that if that man were my lover it would not have been necessary for him to talk to me at the play-house in that box; he would have a thousand other ways of meeting me.  Oh, no, my friend, I assure you that since the day when I had the happiness to meet you, I have been yours entirely.  Could I have been another’s?  What you imagine is monstrous.  But I love you, I love you!  I love only you.  I never have loved any one except you.”

He replied slowly, with cruel heaviness: 

“’I shall be every day, at three o’clock, at our home, in the Rue Spontini.’  It was not a lover, your lover, who said these things?  No! it was a stranger, an unknown person.”

She straightened herself, and with painful gravity said: 

“Yes, I had been his.  You knew it.  I have denied it, I have told an untruth, not to irritate or grieve you.  I saw you so anxious.  But I lied so little and so badly.  You knew.  Do not reproach me for it.  You knew; you often spoke to me of the past, and then one day somebody told you at the restaurant—­and you imagined much more than ever happened.  While telling an untruth, I was not deceiving you.  If you knew the little that he was in my life!  There!  I did not know you.  I did not know you were to come.  I was lonely.”

She fell on her knees.

“I was wrong.  I should have waited for you.  But if you knew how slight a matter that was in my life!”

And with her voice modulated to a soft and singing complaint she said: 

“Why did you not come sooner, why?”

She dragged herself to him, tried to take his hands.  He repelled her.

“I was stupid.  I did not think.  I did not know.  I did not wish to know.”

He rose and exclaimed, in an explosion of hatred: 

“I did not wish him to be that man.”

She sat in the place which he had left, and there, plaintively, in a low voice, she explained the past.  In that time she lived in a world horribly commonplace.  She had yielded, but she had regretted at once.  If he but knew the sadness of her life he would not be jealous.  He would pity her.  She shook her head and said, looking at him through the falling locks of her hair: 

“I am talking to you of another woman.  There is nothing in common between that woman and me.  I exist only since I have known you, since I have belonged to you.”

He walked about the room madly.  He laughed painfully.

“Yes; but while you loved me, the other woman—­the one who was not you?”