Their confidences went further, now. It would not be easy to reproduce them all. It comes quite naturally to young girls who love each other to calmly say audacious things in their conversation, things that in their mouths preserve a semi-innocence, but which would have none were they repeated by another. In these talks the difference of their two natures was clearly shown: the laughing, child-like, perfectly assured unmorality of the one; and the passionate, disquieting, electrically charged seriousness of the other. There were clashes; Annette was exasperated by the greedy levity and wilful bawdiness with which Sylvie discussed amorous subjects. Audacious in her soul, she was reserved in her words; it seemed that she feared to hear what she thought. She had fits of shutting herself up in a double tower, in a fierce dumbness that she herself did not quite understand. Sylvie understood it much better. After she had lived with her for fifteen days, Sylvie knew Annette better than Annette knew herself. Yet it was not that her mental faculties lifted her above the average of an agreeable Paris working girl. Aside from a practical sense that was very sound and cautious--but from which she never drew the most possible profit, because she almost always preferred to obey her caprices--she did not emerge from her own sphere to any great extent. Certainly everything amused her, but nothing really interested her except fashions. As for everything that had to do with art--pictures, music, books--she never got beyond the most ordinary stage of appreciation, and sometimes she didn't reach that. Annette was often embarrassed by her taste. Sylvie would realize it, and say: "Ouf! I've put my foot in it again. . . . Well, tell me someone who behaves properly in society! . . ." (She spoke of a picture as one speaks of a hat.) "What should one admire? Once I know, I shall be able to do it as well as anyone else. . . ." But on other occasions she was not so conciliatory; she held out stoutly for the hero of some newspaper serial or for some insipid romance which was to her the last word in art and sentiment. However, she obliged her elder sister to discover the value, or rather the artistic promise, of a genre that Annette had always insisted on running down without knowing anything about it: the movies, which Sylvie adored, indiscriminately.