Alfred now reproached himself for the explanation that he had had with his friend, feeling persuaded that the latter had gone to travel only in order to spare his jealousy. He thought about his wife's melancholy, he found it ever more inexplicable, and he told himself that he had deprived her of one of her few relaxations. She, on the other hand, was profoundly sensible of angered pride on thus encountering her husband's trust, which contrasted too sharply with the distrust of her lover. And then these plans of travelling together, which Alfred called up, were they not the very ones that she had herself formerly cherished? They showed her with only too great precision what might have been--those summer months whose intimate holiday-making she had imagined beforehand. They would have lived together by the seashore in one of the villages of Normandy, where the trees grow green to the very margin of the blue waves. Perhaps they would have seen together one of those Italian towns whose mere names seem to shroud a promise of happiness with light. And then there came nothing but freezing solitude, nothing but desertion! He had not written her a note since their rupture, not a line of pity. But why should he have pitied her? Doubtless he believed her already comforted, perhaps in the arms of another. Why not? He had deemed her capable of having Varades before himself. Two lovers, three, ten, what matters the total if there be more than one? From day to day the keen pain of this injustice became more keen within her, and the pain resulted in a mad and morbid thought, yet the only one that could satisfy somewhat the despair that raged in her heart. Yes, in those hours of anguish she conceived the criminal thought of indeed committing frightful actions, since she had been deemed capable of them, of being like the image that Armand had formed of her, like that fast and facile woman whom he had believed himself to possess. Moral life, like physical life, has its suicidal fevers, its damning frenzies. There are moments when we are driven at all costs to renounce our inner personality, to assassinate it, to become another being. It is especially injustice that produces these crises, mysterious yet so necessary, and so natural that even children, like animals, are subject to them. Are not the best rendered the worst by being beaten without having deserved it? The more Helen was sensible of having been irredeemably misunderstood, the more a frightful attraction impelled her to become just the opposite of what she had formerly been. A vertigo seized her, and, as it were, a delirious longing for degradation. "'Tis too foolish," she said to herself, "to have any heart."