1st.--The period of good motives. Probity. Conscientious need of repairing a wrong action. In actual fact: the moral obligation of devoting to Laura the money which his parents had laboriously saved to meet the initial expenses of his career. Is this not self-sacrifice? Is this motive not respectable, generous, charitable? 2nd.--The period of uneasiness. Scruples. Is not the fear that this sum may be insufficient, the first step towards yielding, when the demon dangles before Vincent’s eyes the possibility of increasing it? 3rd.--Constancy and fortitude. Need after the loss of this sum to feel himself “above adversity.” It is this “fortitude” which enables him to confess his loss at cards to Laura; and which enables him by the same occasion to break with her. 4th.--Renunciation of good motives, regarded as a cheat, in the light of the new ethic which Vincent finds himself obliged to invent in order to legitimize his conduct; for he continues to be a moral being, and the devil will only get the better of him by furnishing him with reasons for self-approval. Theory of immanence, of totality in the moment; of gratuitous, immediate and motiveless joy. 5th.--Intoxication of the winner. Contempt of the reserve in hand. Supremacy. After which the demon has won the game. After which the being who believes himself freest is nothing but a tool at his service. The demon will never rest now till Vincent has sold his brother to that creature of perdition--Passavant. And yet Vincent is not bad. All this, do what he will, leaves him unsatisfied, uncomfortable. Let us add a few words more: The name “_exoticism_” is, I believe, given to those of Maia’s iridescent folds which make the soul feel itself a stranger, which deprive it of points of contact. There are some whose virtue would resist, but that the devil, before attacking it, transplants them. No doubt, if Vincent and Laura had not been under other skies, far from their parents, from their past memories, from all that maintained them in consistency with themselves, she would not have yielded to him, nor he attempted to seduce her. No doubt it seemed to them out there that their act did not enter into the reckoning.... A great deal more might be said; but the above is enough as it is to explain Vincent to us better. With Lilian too he felt himself in a foreign land. “Don’t laugh at me, Lilian,” he said to her that same evening. “I know that you won’t understand, and yet I have to speak to you as if you would, for I’m unable now to get you out of my mind.” Lilian was lying on the low divan, and he, half reclining at her feet, let his head rest, lover-like, on his mistress’s knees, while she, lover-like, caressed it.