"I beg a thousand pardons, sir," said this man, even before Hubert had questioned him. "I did not know that the lady was still there. I had seen you go out, sir, and in the afternoon I went in to give a look round the place, as I do every day, and found the lady sitting on the sofa. She seemed to be in great pain. Is she better to-day, sir?" he added. "She is very well," replied Hubert, and as he suddenly felt a strong repugnance to entering the apartments, and on the other hand wished at all costs to avoid giving this man, for whom he had such an antipathy, any grounds for suspecting the drama in his life, he replied, "I have come to settle your bill. I am going on a journey." "But you have already paid me, sir, at the beginning of the month," said the other. "I may be away for a long time," said Hubert drawing a bank-note from his pocket-book. "You will put this down to the account." "You are not coming in, sir?" resumed the doorkeeper. "No," said Hubert, and he went away, saying to himself, "I am a simpleton. Women of that sort don't kill themselves!" Women of that sort! The phrase, which had occurred naturally to him, the youth hitherto so ingenuous, so gentle, and so refined, was a fitting translation of the kind of feeling which now held the ascendancy over him, and which lasted for several days. It was a boundless disgust, a thorough nausea; but so complete and so profound was it, that it left no room in his heart for anything else. He could not even have told whether he was suffering, so entirely did contempt absorb all the living energies of his being. He perceived the woman whom he had idolised so religiously and with so noble a fervour, plunged, as it were, and wallowing in such an abyss of uncleanness, that he felt as though by loving her he had himself been rolling in the mire. This was the physical sight of which he was now the victim from one end of the day to the other, and to such a degree that he was unable to interpret it or form any hypothesis concerning Theresa's character. The sight of it was inflicted upon him with a material exactness which bordered on hallucination. Yes, he could see the act, and the act alone, without having strength enough to shake off the hideous, besetting fellowship. It paralysed him with horror, and he could think of nothing else. A sort of unbroken mirage showed him the abominable pollution of his mistress's prostitution, and, just as a man attacked by jaundice looks at all objects through bile-infected eyes, so it was, through his disgust, that he viewed, the whole of life. His soul was as though saturated with bitterness, and yet was frightfully dry. There was not an impression that was not transformed in him into this perception of foulness and melancholy.