A pleasing process--evaporation. Dreams, ambitions, longings--all these had evaporated slowly and secretively during the twenty-six years, vanished into thin air. And each had been preoccupied with this process of evaporation. It had been their real life--the life which diverted them and which they mutually concealed from each other as they sat together reading of evenings, or rode in cars or waited in offices or lay in bed. Here in this real life were success and beauty and marvelous activities. Here Basine _père_ planned Herculean enterprise and triumphed with magnificent gestures, became a leader of finance, of armies; became a lover of queens and odalisques. Caressing from day to day phantasms which had no existence, it was in them that he chiefly existed. He confined himself not only to illusions of grandeur. There were also little things, charming minor victories which delighted his ego almost as much as the greater ones. He was able to trick out the minor victories with the illusion of reality. They were things that might happen, that one could dream about almost as actually happening. Things that he fancied people might be saying about him; admissions that he fancied people might make to him; dreams that he fancied he inspired in women who passed him and whom he never saw again. This illusory existence preoccupying Basine had fitted him ideally for the companionship of orderly, placid-minded folk preoccupied like himself with similar processes of evaporation. These folk were his friends with whom he went to the theater, played cards, transacted business, discussed issues. They were known as normal, practical persons. The vast, illusory worlds in which they lived during the greater part of their hours in no way encroached upon the realities of their day. They were proud of having a grip on themselves, by which they meant of being able to allow their energies to evaporate secretively instead of feeling inspired to harness them to realities and run the risk of being hoisted body and soul out of their shells into a maelstrom of uncertainties and hullabaloos. In order to rationalize the disparity between their actual estates and the fantastic estates of their illusory lives, they devoted a part of their energies to the practical business of glorifying their shells. They subscribed with indignation, sometimes with fanaticism, to all social, spiritual and political ideas which had for their objective the glorification of their shells. They became champions of systems of thought and conduct which excused on one hand and deified on the other their devitalized modes of existence.