everything.

"Coquetry is permissible. One may conciliate that with all the
exigencies of fashionable life. Not so love. Love is the least mundane
of passions, the most anti-social, the most savage, the most barbarous.
So the world judges it more severely than mere gallantry or looseness
of manners. In one sense the world is right. A woman in love betrays
her nature and fails in her function, which is to be admired by all men,
like a work of art. A woman is a work of art, the most marvellous that
man's industry ever has produced. A woman is a wonderful artifice, due
to the concourse of all the arts mechanical and of all the arts liberal.
She is the work of everybody, she belongs to the world."

Therese closed the book and thought that these ideas were only the
dreams of novelists who did not know life. She knew very well that there
was in reality neither a Carmel of passion nor a chain of love, nor
a beautiful and terrible vocation against which the predestined
one resisted in vain; she knew very well that love was only a brief
intoxication from which one recovered a little sadder. And yet, perhaps,
she did not know everything; perhaps there were loves in which one was
deliciously lost. She put out her lamp. The dreams of her first youth
came back to her.

CHAPTER VI. A DISTINGUISHED RELICT

It was raining. Madame Martin-Belleme saw confusedly through the glass
of her coupe the multitude of passing umbrellas, like black turtles
under the watery skies. She was thinking. Her thoughts were gray and
indistinct, like the aspect of the streets and the squares.

She no longer knew why the idea had come to her to spend a month with
Miss Bell. Truly, she never had known. The idea had been like a spring,
at first hidden by leaves, and now forming the current of a deep and
rapid stream. She remembered that Tuesday night at dinner she had said
suddenly that she wished to go, but she could not remember the first
flush of that desire. It was not the wish to act toward Robert Le Menil
as he was acting toward her. Doubtless she thought it excellent to go
travelling in Italy while he went fox-hunting. This seemed to her a
fair arrangement. Robert, who was always pleased to see her when he came
back, would not find her on his return. She thought this would be right.
She had not thought of it at first. And since then she had thought
little of it, and really she was not going for the pleasure of making
him grieve. She had agains