"This day will be horrible. After all, it is worse than Guido, worse than Valentine! Such a retrogression is degrading. And I think I am master of myself, master of the external world, master of this universe--a woman--when I cannot even regulate the order the logical sequence of my impressions! The human mechanism should be known to me, and if consequences are unconquerable, at least the causes should submit to my will. The saints, with the aid of God, had this power; but God has deserted us and because of the modern Celsus' has left us, without bucklers, exposed to the arrows of Sin. Henceforth, all hours are its hour and we all belong to it: it has conquered time, space and number." Hubert had never felt, as in those moments, the misfortune of being a man and of being nothing else. His pride, ruined by his passion, collapsed like an old wall, and, lying on the ruins bemoaned himself. This attraction, reasoned and combatted with the logical weapons of his character, became the stronger, dominated him consciously and unconsciously. He had come to a state where he no longer thought; his mind no longer functioned save in brief deductions, and the need of security distracted him from exact observation. During those decisive days, in which Sixtine had taken a part, without a doubt, he limited his tactics to brief recalls of presence, instead of obtruding himself point-blank and barring the road to every other unforeseen arrival. It was easy to avoid the nocturnal visitation, by going himself to the fair visitor: if a magnetic and super-reasonable force had thrust Sixtine in his arms while asleep, this same force, according to the most elementary directions, had, on occasion, very, surely joined their realities, as it had joined their phantasms. He lost knowledge of his philosophy, revealed himself capable of nothing but theories--a critic and not a creator of life. Whether this encounter in unconsciousness was the result of a wholly personal hallucination, or whether both had been, in their sleep, summoned towards each other by the power of desire, and whether, while she visited him, he, in turn, had gone to her--all this he could not unravel. Yet he knew the import and the frequency of these mutual evocations and his soul was a battlefield where mysticism had instantly vanquished incredulity. He went to stroll along the quais. The winter sun smiled, the wind had abated, sparrows chirped on the leafless trees, a warm humidity vaporized the mild air. Books, first, passed before his eyes as far off and inaccessible things; then a binding tempted his hand, an unknown title, his attention. He felt the first titillations of fever, and gave himself up. Now, one by one, he touched them, opened them, to acquire the certainty of the nothingness within; he grieved that a pleasant golden binding enclosed the gallant nonsense of little shivering verses of indigence, or the philosophism of a Diderot, or the worthless manuals of Jansenistic piety.