Jeannine was not at all apprehensive of these giddy escapades. It was an intellectual gymnastic, satisfying apparently the same taste for action and expansion which she showed in the physical sphere. And yet after one of these flights she used to feel the necessity of drawing breath and retiring upon some graceful standpoint, in the same way in which she would make a point of doing her hair and dressing for dinner, on her return from an expedition. If I tried to lure her on again, she resisted with a smile. "No, now let's talk seriously." Then I would see her withdraw into a fortress built of all she definitely believed and knew, opinions, reveries, and prejudices which, though she was charmingly logical, she owed to her race and education. The best of it was that once in refuge there, in full possession of her truths, the last thing she aimed at was to convert me. I, in my turn, was obliged to shut myself up behind ramparts; I had some all ready-made from whence I braved the world. Oh! there was nothing very new in it, in this doctrine I had drawn from my reading and reflections, but I flattered myself that by having thought it over, I had made it my own private property. It was the eternal ego. Jeannine protested against it. She claimed that she was not at all a rebel to the requirements of logic, indeed I recognised her intellectual courage, her taste for sincerity. She had no religion to embarrass her, no faith with which she might be tempted to oppose the claims of her reason. Was she even a Catholic? No, simply a free-thinker, though she did not boast about it in order not to grieve her grandmother, who was, by the way, but a lukewarm _dévote_. She dreamt, however, that pure self-love was not the highest end, that there were great souls, and lesser ones, that from time to time, a little of the divine might inspire our dust.... Moonshine! I chaffed her: I made fun of all her would-be noble feelings; I discovered gnawing egoism in them; I raised this dreary God to a pinnacle. I went further; I was not afraid to unveil for her sometimes the depths of my nihilism. Dried up and incapable of experiencing the least emotion, I had adopted the standpoint, I told her, of considering the universe as a scene, life as a vulgar farce, denuded of rhythm and spaciousness, where each of us played a part. I did not envy that of any one else, and mine did not interest me in the least. When I made such confessions Jeannine looked at me in silence; then she began to laugh: "You're making fun of me!" I denied it, guilty nevertheless of a smile which belied me. But, in my inmost conscience, I knew only too well that I had not spoken in fun. This young dialectician, whom my paradoxes amused, would have been chilled, revolted, estranged from me for ever, if she had thought that my courtesy hid nothing but this brutal scepticism, this cowardly lack of curiosity. * * * * *