ranquillity. After three years she defended her
conduct as innocent and natural.

Having done harm to no one, she had no regrets. She was content. She was
in love, she was loved. Doubtless she had not felt the intoxication she
had expected, but does one ever feel it? She was the friend of the good
and honest fellow, much liked by women who passed for disdainful and
hard to please, and he had a true affection for her. The pleasure she
gave him and the joy of being beautiful for him attached her to this
friend. He made life for her not continually delightful, but easy to
bear, and at times agreeable.

That which she had not divined in her solitude, notwithstanding vague
yearnings and apparently causeless sadness, he had revealed to her.
She knew herself when she knew him. It was a happy astonishment. Their
sympathies were not in their minds. Her inclination toward him was
simple and frank, and at this moment she found pleasure in the idea of
meeting him the next day in the little apartment where they had met
for three years. With a shake of the head and a shrug of her shoulders,
coarser than one would have expected from this exquisite woman, sitting
alone by the dying fire, she said to herself: "There! I need love!"

CHAPTER II. "ONE CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE YOUNG!"

It was no longer daylight when they came out of the little apartment in
the Rue Spontini. Robert Le Menil made a sign to a coachman, and entered
the carriage with Therese. Close together, they rolled among the vague
shadows, cut by sudden lights, through the ghostly city, having in their
minds only sweet and vanishing impressions while everything around them
seemed confused and fleeting.

The carriage approached the Pont-Neuf. They stepped out. A dry cold
made vivid the sombre January weather. Under her veil Therese joyfully
inhaled the wind which swept on the hardened soil a dust white as salt.
She was glad to wander freely among unknown things. She liked to see the
stony landscape which the clearness of the air made distinct; to walk
quickly and firmly on the quay where the trees displayed the black
tracery of their branches on the horizon reddened by the smoke of the
city; to look at the Seine. In the sky the first stars appeared.

"One would think that the wind would put them out," she said.

He observed, too, that they scintillated a great deal. He did not think
it was a sign of rain, as the peasants believe. He had observed, on
the contrary, th