“One must never judge what is visible,” he replied with sudden seriousness which contrasted strangely with his former flippancy. Did he conceal in an inner fold of his heart, poisoned though it was with social vanity, commercial calculations and literary ambitions, a tender corner, too small to be ever exalted into complete passion, but sufficiently alive to sometimes bleed, and had I touched the secret wound? Or was his one of those complicated natures which keep just enough sensibility to suffer because they have no more? These two latter hypothesis are not irreconcilable in such a complex nature. They would at least explain the anomaly of a talent for accurate human observation, being associated with such implacable hardness of heart and a systematic and utilitarian depravity of mind. Never had the astounding contrast between Jacques’ person and his work struck me as it did in that rapidly moving carriage. He was the first to break a silence which had lasted for a few minutes by saying—he was without doubt replying to a thought my reproaches had suggested to him— “Besides, if it were to begin again, I should have prevented that party. It is useless. I don’t know what fresh information Bonnivet has received, but he is charming to me and his wife. I found both of them the other day examining two ornaments their jeweller had just brought. In parenthesis, what do you think of this conjugal scene? She was clasping around her neck a necklace of pearls and looking at herself in the glass, while her husband said to me—to me!—as she showed me another one: 'Which one do you prefer?’ She experienced a keen pleasure at this high comedy scene. I saw that her eyes were shining like the pearls in the necklace. At what price had she purchased this renewal of confidence?” “But,” I said, “did not a scene like this, and the conclusion you drew from it, make you take your hat and stick and go away, never to return?” “You are not, and never will be, intellectual, my dear boy,” he replied. “Understand that there is a sort of bitter and ferocious joy in despising what one desires, just as there is in enjoying what one hates. That is how Queen Anne holds me fast, perhaps for a long time, just as I hold her fast by the attraction of the danger involved. We have already, since the affair, revisited the rooms in the Rue Nouvelle; would you believe it? Decidedly there is no tincture of cantharides like fear?” “That is folly,” I cried, “to tempt fate like that!” “Quite right,” he said with a shrug of the shoulders, “but one must live to write. There is a play in this story, and I will not miss it.”