"Passions! I?" she said to herself. "In Heaven's name, does he think that I don't know what passion is, and that I want any more of that poisoned draught? What have I done to him, I who have given him so much affection and thought, that he should propose to me, by way of thanks, despair, madness, and death?--After all," she thought, "it is not his fault, poor creature! He doesn't know what he wants, nor what he asks for. He seeks love like the philosopher's stone, in which one strives all the more earnestly to believe because he cannot grasp it. He thinks that I have it, and that I amuse myself by refusing to give it to him! There is always a touch of frenzy in whatever he thinks. How can I appease him, and turn him aside from a fancy that is rapidly making him unhappy? "It is my fault; he has some right to say so. While trying to wean him from debauchery, I familiarized him too much with a virtuous attachment; but he is a man, and he deems our affection incomplete. Why did he deceive me? why did he make me believe that he was tranquil when he was with me? What shall I do to repair the idiocy of my inexperience? I have not been enough of a woman in the matter of presumption. I did not know that a woman, however lukewarm and weary of life she may be, can still disturb a man's brain. I ought to have believed that I was fascinating and dangerous, as he once told me, and to have guessed that he afterward contradicted himself on that point only to quiet my fears. So it is a misfortune, then,--for it certainly cannot be a sin,--not to have the instinct of coquetry?" Thereupon, Thérèse, searching her memory, remembered that she had instinctively been reserved and distrustful to defend herself from the desires of other men who were not attractive to her; with Laurent she felt no such instinct, because she esteemed him in his friendship for her, because she could not believe that he would seek to deceive her, and also, it must be admitted, because she cared more for him than for any other. Alone in her studio, she paced the floor, oppressed by a painful sense of discomfort, sometimes glancing at the fatal letter which she had placed on a table as if she knew not what to do with it and could neither decide to read it again nor to destroy it, and sometimes looking at her unfinished work on the easel. She was working with enthusiasm and pleasure when they brought her that letter, that is to say, that doubt, that anxiety, that amazement, and that dread. It was like a mirage which caused all the spectres of her former miseries to reappear upon her unclouded, peaceful horizon. Every word written on that paper was like a hymn of death which she had heard in the past, a prophecy of fresh misfortunes to come.