In the afternoon they went out, each about his own business. Marc watched his mother in the distance. He was torn by conflicting feelings: he admired her, he was irritated by her. . . . Women were too much for him! Women, every woman. At times they were so close, at other times so very far away! A strange race. . . . Nothing about them is like ourselves. One never knows what is going on in them, why they laugh, why they cry. He scorned them, he despised them, he needed them, he pined for them! He was angry with them just because of this obsession. He could have bitten the neck of that woman who was walking by as he had bitten Noémi's wrist--as he would have liked to bite it--till the blood flowed! At this sudden memory his startled heart gave a leap. He stopped, turned pale and spat with disgust. He crossed the Luxembourg Gardens, where the young men were playing. He looked at them enviously. The best part of him, his secret desires, went out towards manly activity, without love, without women--sport, heroic games. But he was weakly: an unjust fate, his illness as a child, had placed him in a position of inferiority in the race of his own generation. And his sedentary life, his books, his dreams, the companionship of women, the two sisters, had poisoned him with this venom of love, transmitted by his mother, his aunt, his grandfather, by all the blood of the Rivières. How he would have liked to spill that blood, to open his veins! Ah, how he envied those young men with their beautiful limbs, empty of thought, full of light! All the riches that were his he despised. He could think of nothing but those of which he was deprived, the games and contests of harmonious bodies. And in his injustice he did not see that other contest which his mother was waging so close to him. . . .