I related my meeting with George at such length that I was obliged to stop at the moment when Olivier came on the scene. I began this tale only to speak of him and I have managed to speak only of George. But now that the moment has come to speak of Olivier I understand that it was desire to defer that moment which was the cause of all my slowness. As soon as I saw him that first day, as soon as he sat down to the family meal, at my first look--or rather at _his_ first look--I felt that look of his take possession of me wholly, and that my life was no longer mine to dispose of. Pauline presses me to go and see her oftener. She begs me urgently to interest myself in her boys. She gives me to understand that their father knows very little about them. The more I talk to her, the more charming I think her. I cannot understand how I can have been so long without seeing more of her. The children have been brought up as Catholics; but she remembers her early Protestant training, and though she left our father’s home at the time my mother entered it, I discover many points of resemblance between her and me. She sends her boys to school with Laura’s parents, with whom I myself boarded for so long. This school (half a school and half a boarding house) was founded by old Monsieur Azai’s (a friend of my father’s) who is still the head of it. Though he started life as a pastor, he prides himself on keeping his school free from any denominational tendency--in my time there were even Turks there. Pauline says she has good news from the sanatorium where Vincent is staying; he has almost completely recovered. She tells me that she writes to him about me and that she wishes I knew him better; for I have barely seen him. She builds great hopes on her eldest son; the family is stinting itself in order to enable him to set up for himself shortly--that is, to have rooms of his own where he can receive his patients. In the mean time she has managed to set aside a part of their small apartment for him, by putting Olivier and George on the floor below in a room that happened to be vacant. The great question is whether the state of Vincent’s health will oblige him to give up being house-physician. To tell the truth I take very little interest in Vincent, and if I talk to his mother about him, it is really to please her and so that we can then go on to talk about Olivier at greater length. As for George, he fights shy of me, hardly answers when I speak to him, and gives me a look of indescribable suspicion when we happen to pass each other. He seems unable to forgive me for not having gone to meet him outside the _lycée_--or to forgive himself for his advances to me.