Under her fingers, Annette felt the rough, bushy hair, the swelling of the forehead and the beating temples. This imperious man was placing himself under her protection. She leaned towards him and he raised his face. It was their first kiss. His arms encircled Annette, who had dropped on her knees beside him and no longer resisted, as if she had no breath left, and Philippe, violent as he was, had no thought of taking advantage of his victory. "I want everything," he said, "all of you, mistress, friend, companion--my woman altogether." Annette extricated herself. Noémi's image had risen before her. A moment before it had been she who had driven her from her consciousness. But that Philippe should do the same thing wounded her in a way, wounded her in that instinctive freemasonry of women who, even as enemies, find themselves leagued against the aggressiveness of man--one body in common. "You cannot," said Annette. "You belong to another." He shrugged his shoulders. "There's nothing of me that she possesses." "She has your name and your faith." "What does the name matter? You have the rest." "I don't care about the name, but I must have your faith. I give it and I ask for it." "I am ready to give it to you." But Annette, who had asked for it, felt a certain revolt when it was offered to her. "No! no! Do you mean to take it away from her who has shared your life for years and give it to me whom you have only seen three times?" "It has not required three times for me to see you." "You don't know me." "I do know you. I have learned to see into life quickly. Life goes by and no moment ever appears twice. You must make up your mind on the spot or you can never make it up. You are passing, Rivière, and if I do not take you I lose you. I take you." "You may be making a mistake." "Perhaps. I know that when one makes a decision one often makes a mistake. But in not deciding one always makes a mistake. I should never forgive myself the error of having seen you without determining to possess you." "What do you know about me?" "More than you think. I know that you have been rich and that you are poor, that you had a youth filled with all the pleasures of wealth and that you were ruined and cast out of your world, that you have struggled and not weakened. I know what your struggle has been, for I underwent it myself, every day, for thirty years of my life, a hand-to-hand struggle, and twenty times I was on the point of giving in. You have held out. As for me, I was used to it. I have known abject poverty from the cradle. You had a thin skin, and you were pampered and made much of. You did not yield. You have never accepted any shameful compromise. You never tried to escape the struggle by any feminine means, seduction or the honest expedient of a marriage for money." "Do you imagine it has been offered to me so many times?" "That is because they knew very well, even the meanest of them, that you are not a person to be bought by contract."