What other portrait could one paint of this writer, who was an absolute stranger to anything not his own business, as methodical as if he were not a man of the world, as regular as if he were not, by his art itself, the painter of all the troubles and all the disorders of the human soul, than sitting at his table with his cold and reflective face, and his way of using his pen with a free, measured and regular gesture. To make his portrait really typical it was necessary to paint Molan as I surprised him, engaged in reading the four pages he had written since his awakening that morning—four little sheets covered with lines of equal length in a handwriting every letter of which was properly made, every T crossed and every I dotted. Was I envious as I noted these details with an irritation not justified in appearance? He had the right after all, this fellow, to administer his literary fortune as if it were a house of business. But is there not something in us, almost a sense which this indefinable deception offends: this working of a fine talent, with so much egoism, so much calculation at its base, and so little moral unity between the written thought and the thought lived? Another mannerism of Jacques’ irritated my nerves. He stretched out his hand to me with an indifferent cordiality quite his own. He had been for months without seeing me till we met at the club, and he spoke to me then in as friendly a way as if we had met on the previous day. He had told me about the two adventures he had on hand as if I were his best and surest friend. Directly I turned on my heel I saw or heard no more of him. I had ceased to exist as far as he was concerned. When I saw him again he greeted me with just the same handshake. How much I prefer, to these smiling and facile friends, the suspicious, the susceptible, and the irritable ones with whom you quarrel, who either want you or do not do so, who often get angry with you, sometimes wrongly and by the most involuntary negligence, but for whom you exist and are real with human living reality! To the real egoists, on the other hand, you are an object, a thing the equal in their eyes of the couch they offer you to sit down upon with their most amiable and empty smile. Your only reality to them is your presence, and the pleasure or the reverse they feel at it. To be entirely frank, perhaps I should have wished Camille’s lover to receive me in the way he always had done, with his impersonal graciousness, if I had not found him looking a little pale and heavy-eyed; and I was obliged to attribute this slight fatigue to his love of the charming girl, whose maidenly grace of the past I had just spent a week in evoking, sustained by the most passionate of retrospective hypnotism. This impression was as painful to me as if I had over Camille other rights than those of dream and sympathy. I had really come to talk about her, and I would have liked to depart without even her name being mentioned.