Olivier du Prat thought he knew himself. It was a pretension he had often justified. He was really, as he had said to Hautefeuille, a child of the declining century in his tastes, in his passion, almost mania, for self-analysis, in his thirst for emotions, in his powerlessness to remain faithful to any one of his sensations, in his useless lucidity, as regarded himself, and in his indulgence of the morbid, unsatisfied, unquiet longings of his nature. He felt his case was irremediable, the gloomy sign that characterizes the tragically disturbed age we live in, and one of the infallible marks of decadence in a race. Healthy life does not entirely rest upon a freedom from wounds. For the body as for the soul, for a nation as for an individual, vigorous life is indicated by the power to heal those that are made. Olivier was entirely without this capacity. Even the most distant troubles of his childhood became so real as to be agonizing when he thought of them after all the years that had passed. In recalling their walk among the mountains of Auvergne, as he had done the night before to Pierre, he had simply been thinking aloud as he always thought to himself. His imagination was incessantly occupied in turning and returning with an unhealthy activity of mental retrospection, to the hours, the minutes, that had forever vanished. In his mind he reanimated, revived, the past and lived it over again. And by this self-abandonment to a past sensitiveness he continually destroyed all present sensitiveness. He never allowed the wounds that had once been made to heal over, and his oldest injury was always ready to bleed afresh.