They remained silent for a long time.  Then she said, surprised and plaintive: 

“But, my friend, you should have thought that a woman such as I, married as I was—­every day one sees women bring to their lovers a past darker than mine and yet they inspire love.  Ah, my past—­if you knew how insignificant it was!”

“I know what you can give.  One can not forgive to you what one may forgive to another.”

“But, my friend, I am like others.”

“No, you are not like others.  To you one can not forgive anything.”

He talked with set teeth.  His eyes, which she had seen so large, glowing with tenderness, were now dry, harsh, narrowed between wrinkled lids and cast a new glance at her.  He frightened her.  She went to the rear of the room, sat on a chair, and there she remained, trembling, for a long time, smothered by her sobs.  Then she broke into tears.

He sighed: 

“Why did I ever know you?”

She replied, weeping: 

“I do not regret having known you.  I am dying of it, and I do not regret it.  I have loved.”

He stubbornly continued to make her suffer.  He felt that he was playing an odious part, but he could not stop.

“It is possible, after all, that you have loved me too.”

She answered, with soft bitterness: 

“But I have loved only you.  I have loved you too much.  And it is for that you are punishing me.  Oh, can you think that I was to another what I have been to you?”

“Why not?”

She looked at him without force and without courage.

“It is true that you do not believe me.”

She added softly: 

“If I killed myself would you believe me?”

“No, I would not believe you.”

She wiped her cheeks with her handkerchief; then, lifting her eyes, shining through her tears, she said: 

“Then, all is at an end!”

She rose, saw again in the room the thousand things with which she had lived in laughing intimacy, which she had regarded as hers, now suddenly become nothing to her, and confronting her as a stranger and an enemy.  She saw again the nude woman who made, while running, the gesture which had not been explained to her; the Florentine models which recalled to her Fiesole and the enchanted hours of Italy; the profile sketch by Dechartre of the girl who laughed in her pretty pathetic thinness.  She stopped a moment sympathetically in front of that little newspaper girl who had come there too, and had disappeared, carried away in the irresistible current of life and of events.

She repeated: 

“Then all is at an end?”

He remained silent.

The twilight made the room dim.

“What will become of me?” she asked.

“And what will become of me?” he replied.

They looked at each other with sympathy, because each was moved with self-pity.