When she made up her mind to get to the bottom of this joy she was thunderstruck. It was as if she had discovered a cancer in herself. . . . So once more she had been caught in the trap. Love? Love for a man who could only be for her another cause for useless suffering, a man whom she was sure was dangerous, heartless, a man who could not belong to her, who belonged to someone else, a man she could not love because she loved someone else. Someone else? Yes, yes, she still loved Julien. Well, if she loved him, how was it possible for her to love another man? She did love him. . . . But how, how could her heart give itself to two persons at once? Give itself wholly to each without dividing itself? For when she gave her heart Annette gave it completely. . . . She had a feeling that she was prostituting herself. To be sure, to surrender her body would have seemed to her less shameful than to surrender her heart to two loves at once. Wasn't she sincere, loyal to herself? . . . Of course she was. She did not know that she had more than one heart, that she was more than one being. In the forest of a soul there co-exist thickets of thoughts, jungles of desire, twenty different essences. Ordinarily one does not distinguish them: they are asleep. But when the wind passes over them their branches dash against one another. . . . The clash of passions had long since stirred this multiplicity to life in Annette. She was at once a dutiful and a passionately proud woman, a passionate mother, a passionate mistress. Mistress? Mistresses? The forest in the wind with its branches flung out toward all the points of heaven. . . . Annette, humiliated by the oppression of the force that was disposing of her without her consent, thought: "What is the use of willing and struggling for years if one moment is enough to ruin everything? Where does this force come from?" For she repudiated it, furiously, as something alien. Didn't she recognize it as of her own substance? Ah, that was even more overwhelming. How escape from herself? She was not the sort of woman who yields passively to an inner fatality that she despised. She determined to stifle a feeling that mortified her. And with the help of her work she would have succeeded had it not been for Noémi.