Attraction. Repulsion. Every real man knows them. At this period of life the dominating sentiment of the two in Marc was repulsion. But even this repulsion had a sharp savor that made the other sentiments and the children of his own age seem tasteless to him. He despised Odette and regarded this little girl as beneath his dignity. She was a very little girl in reality, and yet, strangely, a woman. In spite of the theories of those illustrious pedagogues who divide childhood into chambered compartments, one for each faculty, everything already exists in the young child from its earliest infancy, everything that one is and will be, the double Being of the present and the future (to say nothing of the immense, impenetrable past that determines both). Only, to catch a glimpse of it, one must have one's eye open. In the half-light of dawn it appears only in gleams. These gleams were more frequent in Odette than in most children. A precocious fruit. Very healthy physically, she carried within her a little world of passions that were too great for her. Whence had they come? From some region that lay behind Annette and Sylvie? Annette was reminded of herself at Odette's age. But she was mistaken; she had been much less precocious; and when, observing Odette, she recalled the forgotten passions of her own childhood, she antedated, in all good faith, the feelings that belonged to her fourteenth and fifteenth years. Odette was an aviary, filled with a sound of restless wings. Little invisible loves passed through her; their flight left lights and shadows behind it. She was placid and hysterical by turns; without any reason she would begin to sob, then burst out laughing; then she would have a feeling of lassitude, of indifference to everything; then again, no one knew why, at a word, at a gesture, interpreted to suit herself, she would be happy again, so happy! . . . Overwhelmed with happiness, drunk with it, like a thrush that is gorged with grapes, she would talk, she would talk. And then, in the twinkling of an eye, she would vanish; no one knew what had become of her; they would find her again in a corner of the store-room, hiding, enjoying the inexplicable happiness she hardly understood herself. This flock of birds came and went in her soul; they succeeded one another in a flash. One never knows how far children are entirely sincere in their emotions: as they come to them from far away, much further back than themselves, they are at first astonished to witness them, and they become actors who play with them experimentally. This power of unconsciously dividing their emotions is an intuitive process of self-preservation, permitting them to carry a burden which, without this, would crush their frail shoulders.