"He strips your heart bare!" The lawyer had classed her
in the third category. Those who suffer came into his first category,
those who love, into the second, and those who are bored, into the
third, and she belonged to the latter.

She was a pretty windmill, whose sails turned and flew round, and
fretted the blue sky with a delicious shiver of joy, as it were. The
brain of a bird, in which four correct and healthy ideas could not exist
side by side, and in which all dreams and every kind of folly are
engulfed, like a great crevice.

Incapable of hurting a fly, emotional, charitable, with a feeling of
tenderness for the street girl who sold bunches of violets for a penny,
for a cab horse, which a driver was ill using, for a melancholy pauper's
funeral, when the body, without friends or relations to follow it, was
being conveyed to the common grave, doing anything that might afford
five minutes' amusement, not caring if she made men miserable for the
rest of their days, and taking pleasure in kindling passions which
consumed men's whole being, looking upon life as too short to be
anything else than one uninterrupted round of gaiety and enjoyment, she
thought that people might find plenty of time for being serious and
reasonable in the evening of life, when they are at the bottom of the
hill, and their looking glass showed them a wrinkled face, surrounded
with white hair.

A thoroughbred Parisian, whom one would follow to the end of the world
like a poodle; a woman whom one adores with the head, the heart and the
senses until one is nearly driven mad, as soon as one has inhaled the
delicate perfume that emanates from her dress and hair, or touched her
skin, and heard her laugh; a woman for whom one would fight a duel and
risk one's life without a thought; for whom a man would remove
mountains, and sell his soul to the devil several times over, if the
devil were still in the habit of frequenting the places of bad repute on
this earth.

She had perhaps come to see this Garrulier, whom she had so often heard
mentioned at five o'clock tea, near, so as to be able to describe him to
her female friends subsequently in droll phrases, to imitate his
gestures and the unctuous inflections of his voice, perhaps, in order to
experience some new sensation, or, perhaps, for the sake of dressing
like a woman who was going to try for a divorce; and, certainly, the
whole effect was perfect. She wore a splendid cloak embroidered with
j