Routed out from under the furniture and the petticoats, where he was absorbed in curious studies of the fidgeting feet and the imprisoned toes curled up in their shoes, dragged back to the conventions, to his normal position in the world of grown-ups, he would remain motionless, soberly seated on a low stool between Sylvie's legs. Or, since his aunt rarely kept still, between some other pair of knees. He would lean his cheek against the warm cloth and watch, with his nose in the air and his head thrown back, those bending faces with their puckered eyes, their quick, shining, moving pupils, those mouths, biting the thread; he saw the saliva and the lower lips--they seemed to be the upper ones--gnawed by the teeth, the undersides of the nostrils, covered with little red streaks and trembling as the words came, and the fingers that flew with their needles. Suddenly a hand would tickle his chin: there was a thimble at the end of it that gave him a cold feeling in his neck. Here, as ever, nothing was lost on him; these warm and cold contacts, this downy glow, these lights that reddened and these shadows that turned to amber the bits of living flesh, yes, and this feminine odor. . . . He was certainly not aware of it himself, but that multiple consciousness, that many-faceted consciousness which is spread about the whole periphery of a child, registered everything that passed over its little printer's-roller. . . . These women never suspected that their images, complete from head to foot, were being imprinted on this little sensitive plate. But he saw them only fragmentarily: pieces were missing, as in a puzzle in which the parts are mixed up. From this resulted his strange, fleeting preferences, as lively as they were varied, which seemed capricious but were really due to his deep-seated predisposition. A clever person might have said what it was in each of these women that attracted him. He was like a regular household pet: it was the gentleness of the hands rather than the whole person that he liked. And it was the totality of these sweetnesses, the home, the workshop. He was frankly an egoist. (And rightfully: the little builder has to assemble his ego first of all.) A sincere egoist, even in his blandishments. For he was blandishing: he wanted to please and he enjoyed giving pleasure, but only to those whom he had chosen.