“Come, come, Thérèse, don’t look like that: if you could see yourself....” She smiled and put on her mask again. “I wasn’t serious ... how silly you are, darling.” But when Bernard tried to come near to her in the taxi, she evaded him and kept him off. The last evening before they returned home, they went to bed at nine o’clock. Thérèse took a cachet, but she was too impatient for sleep and it would not come. For an instant, her mind began to sink beneath the surface when Bernard, with unintelligible mumblings, turned over; and she felt his great fiery body against her own. She pushed it from her and, shrinking from that odious warmth, she lay on the extreme edge of the bed: but after a few minutes, he again rolled towards her as if the flesh in him survived his absent spirit and, even in sleep, fumbled for its accustomed prey. She again thrust him back, roughly this time, but he did not wake.... Oh! if she could push him away once and for all, hurl him out of bed into the darkness! Through the Paris night, the motor-horns answered each other like the dogs and cocks at Argelouse when the moon is up. Not a breath of air rose from the street. Thérèse turned on a lamp and, with her elbow on the pillow, looked at this motionless being asleep beside her--her twenty-seven-year-old husband: he had pushed aside the bed-clothes, and she could not hear him breathing. His tumbled hair straggled over his smooth young forehead. He slept, like Adam, naked and unashamed, a deep and seemingly eternal sleep. The woman threw the sheet over him, got out of bed, looked for one of the letters that she had only half-read, and brought it to the lamp. “_If he told me to follow him, I would leave everything and not look back. We stopped at the edge, the furthest edge of the last caress, but because he wanted to, not because I insisted; it is really he who resists me, and I who long to reach those unknown limits the mere approach to which, he often tells me, is beyond all joys there are: but he won’t go any further: he is proud of being able to stop where he says others cannot help letting themselves go._” Thérèse opened the window, tore up the letters into tiny pieces, bending out over the stone abyss through which, in that hour before the dawn, rumbled a solitary dung-cart. The scraps of paper fluttered down, and came to rest on the balconies of the lower storeys.