Calixte was much more simple: all dream, all faith, all spontaneity. No one could guess at the aim of his movements, and, in short, he had no other aim than movement itself. Older than Entragues by five or six years, and having attained a certain renown as a stylist and delicate thinker, he was unconcerned with it; he always kept the tone and the manners of a beginner, carried his manuscripts here and there, preferably to the little new reviews, not, like others, with the purpose of lording it there, but rather from a need of silence, not to have to discuss, to demonstrate, by a necessary charlatanry, the merit of a work. He earned little, because of his indifference, for he could easily have won a lucrative position in journalism. But he loved, above all things, to work freely and with dignity. His disdain of life was naive: he did not know life, just as one is ignorant of analytical chemistry, and he no more felt the inclination to live in the modern fashion than to shut himself up in a cellar with retorts; either of these careers seemed equally absurd in his estimation. Some dream figures--creatures encountered in the pages of Shakespeare or Calderon, personal creations--sufficed to people his days. He considered his illusions the only beings not endowed with the melancholy spirit of contradiction; he loved them, and he loved Entragues and all the intelligent persons who discussed things politely and without prolixity. He was said to be as chaste as a Franciscan monk: he disclaimed such an eccentricity. A pretty and short love affair did not displease him: he enjoyed a woman's grace more than her beauty, her childishness more than her sex. He considered nervous disorders, so aggravated by the complacency of deteriorated writers, as repugnant maladies that were anti-harmonious, and he shunned dark and thin women, who smell fresh flesh, like the ogre. They entered, as had been agreed, the home of Entragues, who read the following tale to his friend. CHAPTER XX THE TWENTY-EIGHTH OF DECEMBER "... L'une meurt, l'autre vit, mais la morte parfois se venge d'être morte." Anonymous. At the corner of the fire-place, in the cool chamber, they were talking affectingly, for it was the hour when their closed lips, with a tacit agreement, were opening the door to their imprisoned souls. Sidoine had courted Coquerette for two months. He did not speak to her of earth and sky, nor of the charming destiny of lovers who fly away on wings, in the estival purple of evenings, towards the luminous heights; he spoke to her of new dresses and the Auteuil races, of the Opera, of the Salon, of the street, of the Boulogne wood, and of the _Revue des Deux-Mondes_: she understood him and found him witty. Sidoine amused himself in loving listlessly. Having greatly suffered during a whole year, he felt the need of diversion, of playing light-heartedly and of kissing, with a smile, a blond head and two blue eyes.