“Ah, Camille!” she replied, releasing my arm as if an irresistible instinct made her recoil. “Camille is a person who has never had much good sense, and now she has still less than she used to have,” she added with a melancholy and arch nod of the head, a gesture I always noticed her make in times of emotion. “Without a doubt I take after my dear father who had no good sense at all, I have been told, for he married mother for love, and that his brothers, sisters and cousins never forgave. Poor father and poor Camille! But you can see”—she said this with a smile—“that I have no good sense at all by my telling you this after an acquaintance of two hours. I have a theory, however, that friendship is like love, it either comes all at once or not at all.” “In my case you have realized that it has come?” I said to her. “Yes,” she said with almost grave simplicity as she took my arm again and pressed it against her own. “You would like to ask me about my feelings for Jacques? I guessed as much, and you dare not. I should like to explain to you, but I don’t know how. As I have begun to tell you everything, I will try. It seems to me that you will not think so badly of me afterwards, and I don’t want you to think badly of me. I must go back to the beginning again. I have told you how and why I entered the Conservatoire. It is a curious but not very well-known place where there is everything, from the very good to the very bad, corruption and artlessness, intrigues, youth, exasperated vanity, and enthusiasm. During the years I spent there, this enthusiasm for the stage was my romance. Yes, I had the frenzy and fever for being one day a great actress, and I worked. How I worked! Then as one does not reach the age of eighteen without dreaming, without ears to hear and eyes to see, on the day I left there, you can understand, if I was virtuous it was not the virtue of ignorance. I had seen, I think, as many ugly happenings as I shall see in the course of my life. I shall not be courted more brutally than I was by some of my companions, nor more hypocritically than by some of the professors. I shall not receive more depraved advice than I did then from some of my friends, nor less enchanting confidences. But my environment has never had much influence over me. What I was told went in at one ear and out of the other. I listen to the little inner voice of conscience which speaks to me when I am alone. It was this little voice which whispered to me 'yes’ at once when our old friend spoke of the stage. It was the little voice which prevented me succumbing to the temptations by which I was surrounded. Don’t you think the counsels of this little voice were very good ones? Think what a task it was for a girl of my age: always repeating words of love, putting the accents of love into my voice, and giving to my face and gestures the expressions of love. At this acting, a woman ends by catching the fever of the parts she plays.