The curtain rose again. And once more the great wave of sophisms and errors, of erratic folly and passional disorder, surged up, rolled over the public and submerged it. I believe that in the whole theatre there was only this young woman against whom it struck and broke in vain. I did not realise the beauty of the spectacle. “She is sweet,” I thought, in a moment of gentleness, “but still a little childish. She does not understand these devastating passions which sweep away everything. One should be able to comprehend what one has not experienced even; she goes through life with blinders on her eyes; she does not wish to see anything outside of her own narrow little life, straight ahead of her.” In good faith, I dared to think: “_her little life_--” * * * That very evening, or on another like it, as we were driving home from the theatre in our automobile, she asked me suddenly: “Is it true?” “Is what true?” “That there are women and young girls like those whom we saw on the stage?” “Of course there are, many like them, and many worse. What a child you are.” “Ah!” she murmured. She said no more, but the electric light which shone upon her showed me her look of pain. She felt a deep sadness at learning of the existence of so many guilty women. * * * The popular books of the day, which I purposely placed about her, thinking to tempt her into reading, usually inspired her with the same repulsion. She did not retain the names of the authors,--they were destined to be forgotten. Their literary beauty could not, for her, be separated from the beauty of the matter. Those charming modern books in which youth is presented to us as an animal at liberty, through which pleasure runs fearless of the attacks of time and death, in which the mind even has become sensual,--she only opened and began: she never finished them. “Why do you not go on with them?” I asked. “My heart isn’t in them.” “But the author cannot always paint one’s own heart.” “But it is so difficult to read a book in which you find nothing of yourself.” I picked up one of the rejected books on her centre table. “Listen to these beautiful sentences,” I began. “Oh!” she replied, “a mannequin, too, wears beautiful clothes. I prefer something living underneath. Do you remember my wedding gown? It did not become me any too well. But I loved you so much--” * * *