u understand how I love you! I am
always seeking, but cannot find a means. When I think of you--and I am
always thinking of you--I feel in the depths of my being an unspeakable
intoxication of longing to be yours, an irresistible need of giving
myself to you even more completely. I should like to sacrifice myself in
some absolute way, for there is nothing better, when one loves, than to
give, to give always, all, all, life, thought, body, all that one has,
to feel that one is giving, to be ready to risk anything to give still
more. I love you so much that I love to suffer for you, I love even my
anxieties, my torments, my jealousies, the pain I feel when I realize
that you are not longer tender toward me. I love in you a someone that
only I have discovered, a you which is not the you of the world that
is admired and known, a you which is mine, which cannot change nor grow
old, which I cannot cease to love, for I have, to look at it, eyes that
see it alone. But one cannot say these things. There are no words to
express them."

He repeated softly, over and over:

"Dear, dear, dear Any!"

Julio came back, bounding toward them, without having found the quail,
which had kept still at his approach; Annette followed him, breathless
from running.

"I can't run any more," said she. "I will prop myself up with you,
Monsieur painter!"

She leaned on Olivier's free arm, and they returned, walking thus, he
between them, under the shadow of the trees. They spoke no more. He
walked on, possessed by them, penetrated by a sort of feminine essence
with which their contact filled him. He did not try to see them, since
he had them near him; he even closed his eyes that he might feel their
proximity the better. They guided him, conducted him, and he walked
straight before him, fascinated by them, with the one on the left as
well as the one on the right, without knowing, indeed, which was on the
left or which on the right, which was mother, which was daughter.
He abandoned himself willingly to the pleasure of unpremeditated and
exquisite sensuous delight. He even tried to mingle them in his heart,
not to distinguish them in his thought, and quieted desire with the
charm of this confusion. Was it not only one woman beside him, composed
of this mother and daughter, so much alike? And did not the daughter
seem to have come to earth only for the purpose of reanimating his
former love for the mother?

When he opened his eyes on entering t