"No, no! I don't love him any more! . . ." She lied to herself furiously. . . . "I don't love him any more! . . ." In vain! . . . She still loved him. She loved him more than ever. Perhaps not with the noblest part of her--(but what is noble, and what is not?)--Yes! with the noblest too, and with the least! Body and soul! . . . If one could only stop loving when one stopped respecting! How comfortable that would be! . . . But to suffer at the hands of the beloved has never exempted one from loving him: one feels it only the more cruelly when one is forced to love him! . . . Annette was suffering in her wounded love--from lack of confidence, lack of faith in herself, lack of Roger's profound love. She was suffering from the bitter consciousness of all the destroyed hopes which she had hatched and which would never see the light of day. It was because she loved Roger so ardently that she insisted on making him accept her independence. She wanted to be to him more than a woman who abdicates, passive in the union,--a free and sure companion. He took no stock in it. She felt within herself a sorrow, an anger of offended passion. . . . "No! no! I love him no longer! I ought not to, I don't want to. . . ." But her strength crumpled, and, even before she could finish her cry of rebellion, she wept. . . . In the night, in silence. . . . Beneath the ice of reason, alas! she was on fire. . . . There was that which she did not wish to say: what joy she would have found in sacrificing to him all that she had, even her independence, if only he had made a generous move, a gesture, a simple gesture, to sacrifice himself, rather than to sacrifice her! . . . She would not have let him do it. She would have demanded no more than an outburst of the heart, a proof of true love. But that proof, although he loved her in his own way, he was incapable of giving. It did not enter his thoughts. He had judged Annette's desire as a feminine requirement that must be received smilingly, but in which there was not touch sense. What could she wish? Why the devil was she crying? Because she loved him? Well then? . . . "You love me, don't you? You love me? That is the essential thing. . . ." Ah! that word, she had not forgotten that either! . . . Annette smiled amid her tears. Poor Roger! He was what he was. One could not grudge him that. But one does not change. Neither he, nor I. We cannot live together. . . . She dried her eyes. "Come now, one must put a stop to this. . . ." XIV After a white night--(she had drowsed for only an hour or two at dawn)--Annette arose, resolute. With the light of day, calm returned to her. She dressed herself and did her hair methodically, coldly, shutting out of her mind everything that might awaken its doubts, attentive to her toilet, which she made with an even more than ordinary meticulous attention to correct detail.