“He did love her. Oh, I had to pretend at first to be deeply interested in her. I even had to weep with him. And all the time I was horribly jealous. I’m not any more now. Just listen how it began. They were at Pau together in the same home--a sanatorium, where they had been sent because they were supposed to be tuberculous. In reality, they weren’t, either of them. But they thought they were very ill. They were strangers, and the first time they saw each other was on the terrace in the garden, where they were lying side by side on their deck chairs; and all round them were other patients, who spend the whole day lying out of doors in the sun to get cured. As they thought they were doomed to die an early death, they persuaded themselves that nothing they did would be of any consequence. He kept repeating all the time that they neither of them had more than a month to live--and it was the springtime. She was there all alone. Her husband is a little French professor in England. She left him to go to Pau. She had been married six months. He had to pinch and starve to send her there. He used to write to her every day. She’s a young woman of very good family--very well brought up--very reserved--very shy. But once there--I don’t exactly know what he can have said to her, but on the third day she confessed that though she lay with her husband and belonged to him, she did not know the meaning of the word pleasure.” “And what did he say then?” “He took her hand, as it hung down beside her chair, and pressed a long kiss upon it.” “And when he told you that, what did _you_ say?” “I? Oh, frightful! Only fancy! I went off into a _fou rire_. I couldn’t prevent myself, and once I had begun, I couldn’t stop.... It’s not so much what he said that made me laugh--it was the air of interest and consternation which I thought it necessary to take, in order to encourage him to go on. I was afraid of seeming too much amused. And then, in reality, it was all very beautiful and touching. You can’t imagine how moved he was when he told me about it. He had never spoken of it to anyone before. Of course his parents know nothing about it.” “_You_ are the person who ought to write novels.”