"The great aim of my tactics was to represent myself as thoroughly _blase_ and unsusceptible, and to act as though I found the great charm of my intercourse with her merely in the fact that I had at last encountered a kindred nature, who, like me, had long since disclaimed, as a ridiculous delusion, the possession of any warmth of feeling. She accepted the _role_ I assigned to her, but it never occurred to her for a moment to cease trying to tempt me out of mine. Occasional human emotions, into which I now and then allowed my calumniated heart to be betrayed, gave her some right to hope; and the freedom of a watering-place afforded a hundred opportunities for putting me to the test. "Well, it turned out just as it could not help turning out. One evening we came home from a stormy sailing excursion, which had not been entirely free from danger, half wet through and hungry. The return trip had been delayed from the fact of the skipper's having been obliged to stop in the midst of the storm, to mend, as well as he could under the circumstances, a leak in his boat; the consequence was it was late when we reached her fisher's cottage. She herself seemed to have forgotten her enforced _role_ for the moment, and appeared to have no other end in view than to refresh and warm me before dismissing me to my lodgings. While she went into her chamber and put on some dry garments, I was forced to stay in the front-room, which was itself little more than a small bedroom, and exchange my coat--which had been soaked through and through with the salt water--for a Turkish jacket she had selected from her wardrobe; and soon, the tea steaming on the table, the warmth of the fire--which was very grateful in spite of its being early fall--and, above all, the extraordinary manner in which we were dressed after the dangers we had escaped, threw us both into a reckless and merry mood such as I had never before experienced in her presence. "But even now I was still very far from feeling anything like love, not even as much as I had sometimes felt in the most trivial of my adventures. In the midst of my sportive chat with this woman I felt at the bottom of my soul an unconquerable aversion toward her, indeed something almost like a secret horror of her--as if a presentiment were warning me who it was that sat opposite me. But a demon drove me on to play to the end of the _role_ I had once undertaken, for, as I persuaded myself--mad fool that I was!--my _honor_ was at stake! Never was a victory more dearly bought, never did a man who thought to triumph feel himself so lost and degraded in his own sight as I did in that hellish hour. Had I strangled this woman in a fit of blind passion, it would not have so degraded me as this impudent comedy.