"What have you got to trouble you?" "Why, I have got you," she would reply. Ah! why, why is passion not contagious? And what a monstrous thing it is that of two lovers one should be able to feel so much and the other so little! So little! And yet the young man in these crafty interviews allowed himself to speak to his mistress as though he were madly in love with her. Was it in order to beguile with talk the real dryness of his heart? Was it that the vibration of his troubled nerves was completed in phrases as full of tenderness as he was lacking in it himself? If he had had less power of analysis, he would have believed himself in love with Helen, for when beside her he was seized with fits of the most violent desire. But he knew that once out of her presence he would experience nothing but a moral aching, an infinite weariness, a sense of the uselessness of things, and, to sum up, a renewal of that torpor of soul which the fever of the senses galvanised without dissipating. As for Helen, she drank in every word coming at such moments from Armand's lips, like a liquid that would enable her to traverse with intoxication the space separating her from the next meeting. It was, nevertheless, in the course of one of these talkings on the pillow, he leaning on his elbow, and she lying against his breast and watching him, that the first words of disenchantment were pronounced--words after which she began to see her Armand no longer through the mirage of her dreams, but such as he was, with the frightful, deathly aridity of his soul. "Ah, how I should like to have a child by you!" she had murmured to him in the middle of one of these contemplations--"a child who had these eyes," and she raised her hand to touch her lover's eyelids; "who had these lips," and she brushed them with her fingers. "How I should love him!" "I do not wish for it," replied Armand. "I should feel too sad to see him kissing as his father another than myself." "But that would not be!" she exclaimed. "It could not be avoided," he replied. "I would go away with you," she said, "and I should be forced to do so. How could Alfred keep me, now that I never give myself to him?" While she was uttering these words, he looked at her, thinking to himself: "She, too! What strange desire is it that impels them all to give out that they have ceased to belong to their husbands?"