He was not one of those in whom a budding love, even a love of the head, abolishes the senses. The more he dreamed about Rose, the more disquietingly tense grew his nerves. His desire did not turn towards her; he caught himself one evening spying on the wife of the Barnavast keeper, who was showing her legs as she bent over the well. It made him feel rather ashamed, for this big Norman peasant woman, so young and fresh, could boast, he imagined, of nothing more than a peasant's cleanliness--wholly exterior, and he would only, could only tolerate woman in the state of the nymph fresh risen from the bath, like the companions of Diana. Besides, he noticed that Lanfranc was making up to this good creature and doing it in all seriousness. Sure of giving him satisfaction by taking himself off for a few days, he drove to Valognes and took the Paris train. Leonor, without making pretensions to conquests, would have liked to have certain kinds of adventures. He wanted to find one of those women whom some careless husband, whether through avarice or poverty, deprives of the joy of fashionable elegance or who, adorned by a lover's prodigalities, dreams of giving for nothing the present which they none the less very gladly sell. He had experienced these equivocal good graces in the days when he lived in Paris. He had even succeeded, during the space of eighteen months, in enchanting a very agreeable little actress who fitted marvellously into the second category, and he remembered how he had taken in a very pretty and very poor young middle-class woman who had surrendered herself to him because he had given himself out to be a rich nobleman. At the moment his mistress was Mme. de la Mesangerie, a local beauty; but he had never really possessed her as he desired. What Grand Turk ever ruled over such a harem? Paris, the cafés, the concert halls, the theatres, the stations, the big shops, the gardens, the Park! The women belong to whoever takes them; none belongs to herself. None leaves her home in freedom and is sure of not returning a slave. Leonor had no illusions with regard to the results of his sensual quest He knew very well that he would captivate none but willing slaves, slaves by profession, slaves by birth. But the hunt, if the game came and offered itself graciously to the hunter, would still have its attraction--that of choice; the fun would be to put one's hand on the fattest partridge.