"Thanks, thanks, Thérèse. Now I am fairly on my feet again; I know who you are and who I am, and, if I must tell you the whole truth, I believe that I love you better so, for you are a woman now, and not a sphinx. Ah! why didn't you speak sooner?" "Has this passion made such terrible ravages?" said Thérèse, mockingly. "Why, yes, perhaps! Ten years hence I will tell you about it, Thérèse, and we will laugh together over it." "Agreed; good-night." Laurent went to bed in a very tranquil frame of mind and altogether undeceived. He had really suffered on Thérèse's account. He had passionately desired her, but had never dared to let her suspect it. Certainly it was not a meritorious passion. There was as much vanity as curiosity in it. That woman of whom all her friends said: "Whom does she love? I wish it were I, but it is no one," had appeared to him in the guise of a beautiful ideal to be grasped. His imagination had taken fire, his pride had bled with the dread, the almost certainty, of failure. But this young man was not exclusively given over to pride. He had at times a dazzling and dominating vision of the right, the good, and the true. He was an angel, gone astray and diseased, if not absolutely fallen like so many others. The craving for love devoured his heart, and a hundred times a day he asked himself in dismay if he had not abused life too much already, and if he still had strength to be happy. He awoke calm and depressed. He already regretted his chimera, his beautiful sphinx, who read his thoughts with good-natured attention, who admired him, scolded him, pitied him, and encouraged him by turns, without ever revealing a corner of her own destiny, but affording a foretaste of treasures of affection, devotion, perhaps of sensual pleasure! At all events, it was in this way that it pleased Laurent to interpret Thérèse's silence touching herself, and a certain smile, as mysterious as Joconda's, which played about her lips and in the corner of her eye, when he blasphemed in her presence. At such times, she seemed to say to herself: "I could, if I chose, describe the paradise in contrast with that villainous hell; but the poor fool would not understand me." When the mystery of her heart was once unveiled, Thérèse lost her prestige in Laurent's eyes at first. She was no longer anything more than a woman like other women. He was even tempted to degrade her in her own esteem, and, although she had never allowed him to question her, to accuse her of hypocrisy and prudery. But, from the moment that he knew that she belonged to some one, he ceased to regret that he had respected her, and he no longer desired anything of her, not even her friendship, which, he thought, he would have no difficulty in supplying elsewhere.