“If,” he answered shrugging his shoulders. “My dear fellow, I have calculated. To take any woman at all as your mistress is to always run the same number of risks of meeting face to face some one who will kill. It is just like travelling in a carriage or on the railway, or drinking a glass of fresh water which chemists declare is infested with microbes. I brave the dangers, railway accidents, runaway horses, typhoid fevers, and jealous husbands because I love to travel quickly, to refresh and amuse myself. Then Madam de Bonnivet knows her tyrant, her Pierre, who rejoices in the idyllic names of Pierre Amédié Placidi; she knows of what he is capable. She amuses herself by exciting him just far enough to procure for herself that little tremor of fear. When she wants to overstep the mark, she will do it like the reasonable creature she is. Suspicious husbands are like vicious animals. They are ridden more safely after they have been carefully studied and their peculiarities discovered. But now have you a pencil? Good. I will scribble on my card in the box. While we are waiting, let me arrange with the attendant about the letter I want brought to me.” We were at the door of our box. He stopped and exchanged a few words with the attendant, and I saw him hand her a letter which he took from his pocket-book. At this moment his face assumed its real expression, that of a beast of prey, feline and supple, and his fashionable elegance became almost repulsive. “That is it,” he said, “and now we are going to applaud our friend as if we were not the author and his friend. We owe that to her, poor little girl! She will be so disappointed! Write me a line to-morrow or come and see me to let me know how she takes it. I am not at all uneasy as to the result. A woman who loves never suspects the truth. She swallows the most improbable things like a carp does the hook and a yard of string as well.” “But if she guesses that I am lying?” I interrupted. This trick which made me his accomplice weighed upon my conscience, and I was upon the point of refusing my assistance. But if I refused it I should not see Camille again that evening. “She will not guess,” he replied. “But if she insists and demands my word of honour?” “Give it to her. In the case of women false oaths are permissible. But she will not ask you. Here she is! Are we not like two conspirators. How pretty she is! To think that if I might have——But no, there is an old French saying, that the woman a man adores is not the one he possesses, but one he has not yet possessed. You must admit that these words contain more truth than all the works of our analytical friends the hair splitters, Claude Larcher and Julien Dorsenne?”