During the few months of their union he had not loved her, and his lack of feeling had martyred her! But is emotion to be commanded, and tenderness? If he had broken brutally with her, this was a further effect of the potency of ideas over the human will. The perception within him of his friend's sorrow had been stronger than that of his mistress's. He grasped as through a magnifying glass the internal mechanism of which his actions had been the visible sign, the final result; he buried himself in this minute examination of his past. It was all in vain. The weight of his remorse was still there. He succeeded in convincing his intellect, and the conviction did not relieve his heart. His conscience, as the vulgar phrase has it, was tormenting him. But what is conscience other than an illusion? A stone that has been thrown, and that feels itself rolling without even knowing that a hand has thrown it, might also believe itself to be the cause of its own motion. Its conscience might reproach it for the crushing of the grass-blades in its path. Remorse might start up in it. "If I had a spectre before my eyes in consequence of an hallucination," Armand concluded, "should I place credence in apparitions? I should tell myself that I saw a spectre, an empty form, that the condition of my bodily organs inflicted the obsession upon me, and that would be all. Let me suffer from my spectre if it must be so, but let me not believe in it." Granted! Good, evil, remorse, conscience, freedom--all so many unreal apparitions, so many bodiless shadows! But there was indisputable reality in the ruin of a soul, and in the fact that a dreadful destiny had made him the instrument of its ruin. A ruined soul? There are then a life and a death of souls, something that fosters them and something that destroys them, after the manner of spiritual damnation and salvation. Then he thought of Helen's soul before the final disaster, all the episodes of their common past recurred simultaneously to him, and he interpreted and understood them. Now that he knew the truth concerning her, and the extent to which he had misjudged her, the pettiest facts in that past were possessed of unlooked-for significance. The mute moments of his sad sweetheart, her melancholy, her effusiveness, showed to him in turn, and each memory revealed to him at once his own ingratitude and the strength of the feeling that he had inspired. How living was then that woman's soul! How noble even in guilt! What richness in its sensibility! What fulness in its emotions! What depth in its sorrow, and what magnificence in its striving after an inaccessible happiness! And now, in the same soul, what ineffaceable pollution!