"You succeed in pleasing them! This man who visits us, with whom you took lunch, is always asking for you. He never so much as speaks of me. And yet it is I who permit him to come!" "A man who cannot see you in your place at the head of the table, and to whom you never give any proof that you are there, may naturally forget you." "You find it all right because he doesn't forget you. He dotes upon you, by what George says; he asks for news of you, he longs to hear your voice! He annoys me. In fact, child, it was precisely on your account, I admit, that I was obliged to turn him away; he was falling in love with you. Can you imagine it? You ought to thank me!" "In love with me! If that were true I should be all the more sorry for him, poor man! But he must have heard about me? He knows that I am not to be had?" "He hasn't gone as far as that; he only feels happy in your company. When you are not there he misses you. That is all." "Well, where is the love in that? He is like the wounded men whom I have nursed; they were happy in my company; when I went away, I suppose they missed me. If I had concluded from that that they were in love with me----" "You didn't conclude it, on your part, but as for them, what do you know? Perhaps you broke their hearts!" "You are romantic and think only of love! Men who have suffered as they have, prefer to think of their own comfort, and of those who make them comfortable. I knew a nurse seventy years old for whom her patients clamored like children. Were they in love with her?" "That proves nothing. A blind man feels very clearly whether the woman near him is one who charms." "Then he ought also to feel the compassion that he inspires, and that does not lead to love." "Are you uncomfortable in the presence of a blind man?" "It is an undefinable emotion; my head turns. I lose my self-command." "You didn't seem to, here." "One does almost involuntarily the thing that costs the most, if one is determined to comfort those whose misfortunes arouse your emotions." And they talked of other things. XXXIV Odette would no doubt have forgotten "her" blind man if a visit which Mme. de Blauve paid her had not recalled him to mind in the most unexpected manner. Mme. de Blauve, whose calmness had always impressed every one, from the time when she was living under the bombardment of Rheims through the days in which she had made the sacrifice of her husband, her two sons, and, one may say, her daughter, now appeared unnerved. She had grown thin; her eyes were sunken; she was evidently suffering.