My heart melted. How tactfully and ingeniously my friend had led round to the subject. I burned to reply to this chaste invitation by an avowal, to confess to him that for me too, toil and suffering were alleviated ... to tell him a tale of some romance or other with this girl as heroine. Alas! I restrained myself in time. It would have been a tale indeed--to lie just at the moment when the need of candour was devouring me. Could I tell him what there was to tell? Unhappy wretch! There was nothing! What was there between her and me? Nothing. Good God, nothing! The pity of it! A holiday friendship, an exchange of post-cards, that was all.... It was true that for the last few days my imagination had been indulging in dangerous flights of fancy.... What an awakening I was preparing for myself. By what right did I think ... that someone else was being inebriated at the same time by a twin exaltation. It would have needed a miracle and there was nothing to suggest that! Had my letter arrived? If so would she not have been astonished, and indeed shocked--not to mention the people with her--at my having written in a closed envelope? Should I ever receive a reply? So I could do nothing but murmur in an offhand tone: "Bah! A flirt here and there!" I suddenly wondered whether Guillaumin had not asked me, as it often happens, solely in order to be asked himself. Did he want to open his heart to me about some secret fondness? At the sight of his ugliness I thought: "Could any one possibly love him?" But I was annoyed with myself for this reflection.... "And what about you?" I said. He smiled, without a trace of sadness or forced merriment. "Oh, with a mug like mine! No, there's only one woman with whom I count for anything, and that's my sister. But for her sake, it would annoy me to go under!" It was the second time that I had heard him allude to his sister. I questioned him, and he told me she was called Louise, and was twenty-five years old. They had lived together since their mother's death. She gave piano lessons. "You'll have to get her married," I said. He shook his head gently: "She is as ugly ... as I am!" * * * * *