"I think Olivier is going mad. These last few days he has been even stranger than ever.--This evening, for example, he regarded me with a look that was so curious, so insistent, so penetrating, that I feel positively uneasy. I have not reposed any confidence in him, and yet I had the impression that he read in me — not your name.--Ah! happily, not that--not that!--but how am I to explain it?--my impatience, my desire, my passion, my happiness, all my sensations? And I had a feeling that my sentiments filled him with horror.--Why?--Is he not unjust? Have I taken away from our friendship in loving you? I was very miserable about it. Finally at ten o'clock I bade good night to him and his wife.--A quarter of an hour later some one knocked at my door. It was Olivier.--He said, 'Would you mind coming for a walk? I feel that I cannot sleep until I have taken a stroll.'--I replied, 'I am sorry I cannot; I have some letters to write.' I had to find some excuse. He looked at me again with the same expression that he had had during dinner.--And all at once he began to laugh. I cannot describe his laugh to you. There was something so cruel in it, so frightfully insulting, so impossible to tolerate. He had not spoken a word, and yet I knew that he was laughing at my love. I stopped him, for I felt a sort of fury rising in me. I said, 'What are you laughing at?'--He replied, 'At a souvenir.' His face became perfectly pale. He stopped laughing just as brusquely as he had begun. I saw that he was going to burst into tears, and before I could ask him anything he had said 'Adieu' and gone out of the room." There is a necessity for conflict in the natural, logical issue of certain situations, a necessity so inevitable that even those who feel they will be destroyed by it accept the struggle when it comes without seeking to avoid it. It is thus, in public life, that peoples go to war, and in private life rivals accept the duel with a passive fatalism that often contradicts their complete character. They recognize that they have been caught in the orbit of action of a power stronger than human will.