“No,” she interrupted, “in me you love, as you said very truly before dinner, a woman who satisfies the needs of your heart, a woman who never has caused you a pain, and who has put a little happiness into your life.  I know that; I feel it.  Yes, I have the good consciousness, the ardent joy of having been good, useful, and helpful to you.  You have loved, you still love all that you find agreeable in me, my attentions to you, my admiration, my wish to please you, my passion, the complete gift I made to you of my whole being.  But it is not I you really love, do you know?  Oh, I feel that as one feels a cold current of air.  You love a thousand things about me—­my beauty, which is fast leaving me, my devotion, the wit they say I possess, the opinion the world has of me, and that which I have of you in my heart; but it is not I—­I, nothing but myself—­do you understand?”

He laughed in a soft and friendly way.

“No, I do not understand you very well.  You make a reproachful attack which is quite unexpected.”

“Oh, my God!  I wish I could make you understand how I love you!  I am always seeking, but cannot find a means.  When I think of you—­and I am always thinking of you—­I feel in the depths of my being an unspeakable intoxication of longing to be yours, an irresistible need of giving myself to you even more completely.  I should like to sacrifice myself in some absolute way, for there is nothing better, when one loves, than to give, to give always, all, all, life, thought, body, all that one has, to feel that one is giving, to be ready to risk anything to give still more.  I love you so much that I love to suffer for you, I love even my anxieties, my torments, my jealousies, the pain I feel when I realize that you are not longer tender toward me.  I love in you a someone that only I have discovered, a you which is not the you of the world that is admired and known, a you which is mine, which cannot change nor grow old, which I cannot cease to love, for I have, to look at it, eyes that see it alone.  But one cannot say these things.  There are no words to express them.”

He repeated softly, over and over: 

“Dear, dear, dear Any!”

Julio came back, bounding toward them, without having found the quail, which had kept still at his approach; Annette followed him, breathless from running.

“I can’t run any more,” said she.  “I will prop myself up with you, Monsieur painter!”

She leaned on Olivier’s free arm, and they returned, walking thus, he between them, under the shadow of the trees.  They spoke no more.  He walked on, possessed by them, penetrated by a sort of feminine essence with which their contact filled him.  He did not try to see them, since he had them near him; he even closed his eyes that he might feel their proximity the better.  They guided him, conducted him, and he walked straight before him, fascinated by them, with the one on the left as well as the one