"Perhaps you have made a mistake this time." "We shall see." "Ah! In that case I'm done! You terrify me. If I think you are watching me, I shall lose what little wits I have." With fond and eager curiosity Christophe watched the sensitive, mobile face, which blushed and went pale by turns. Emotion showed fleeting across it like the shadows of clouds on a lake. "What a nervous youngster it is!" he thought. "He is like a woman." He touched his knee. "Come, come!" he said. "Do you think I should come to you with weapons concealed about me? I have a horror of people who practise their psychology on their friends. I only ask that we should both be open and sincere, and frankly and without shame, and without being afraid of committing ourselves finally to anything or of any sort of contradiction, be true to what we feel. I ask only the right to love now, and next minute, if needs must, to be out of love. There's loyalty and manliness in that, isn't there?" Olivier gazed at him with serious eyes, and replied: "No doubt. It is the more manly part, and you are strong enough. But I don't think I am." "I'm sure you are," said Christophe; "but in a different way. And then, I've come just to help you to be strong, if you want to be so. For what I have just said gives me leave to go on and say, with more frankness than I should otherwise have had, that--without prejudice for to-morrow--I love you." Olivier blushed hotly. He was struck dumb with embarrassment, and could not speak. Christophe glanced round the room. "It's a poor place you live in. Haven't you another room?" "Only a lumber-room." "Ugh! I can't breathe. How do you manage to live here?" "One does it somehow." "I couldn't--never." Christophe unbuttoned his waistcoat and took a long breath. Olivier went and opened the window wide. "You must be very unhappy in a town, M. Krafft. But there's no danger of my suffering from too much vitality. I breathe so little that I can live anywhere. And yet there are nights in summer when even I am hard put to it to get through. I'm terrified when I see them coming. Then I stay sitting up in bed, and I'm almost stifled." Christophe looked at the heap of pillows on the bed, and from them to Olivier's worn face: and he could see him struggling there in the darkness. "Leave it," he said. "Why do you stay?" Olivier shrugged his shoulders and replied carelessly: "It doesn't matter where I live." Heavy footsteps padded across the floor above them. In the room below a shrill argument was toward. And always, without ceasing, the walls were shaken by the rumbling of the buses in the street. "And the house!" Christophe went on. "The house reeking of filth, the hot dirtiness of it all, the shameful poverty--how can you bring yourself to come back to it night after night? Don't you lose heart with it all? I couldn't live in it for a moment. I'd rather sleep under an arch."