that instinct of reflection, that necessity for security, which
was so strong in her. She had not chosen: one seldom chooses. She had
not allowed herself to be taken at random and by surprise. She had done
what she had wished to do, as much as one ever does what one wishes to
do in such cases. She had nothing to regret. He had been to her what it
was his duty to be. She felt, in spite of everything, that all was at
an end. She thought, with dry sadness, that three years of her life had
been given to an honest man who had loved her and whom she had loved.
"For I loved him. I must have loved him in order to give myself to him."
But she could not feel again the sentiments of early days, the movements
of her mind when she had yielded. She recalled small and insignificant
circumstances: the flowers on the wall-paper and the pictures in the
room. She recalled the words, a little ridiculous and almost touching,
that he had said to her. But it seemed to her that the adventure had
occurred to another woman, to a stranger whom she did not like and whom
she hardly understood. And what had happened only a moment ago seemed
far distant now. The room, the lilacs in the crystal vase, the little
cup of Bohemian glass where she found her pins--she saw all these things
as if through a window that one passes in the street. She was without
bitterness, and even without sadness. She had nothing to forgive, alas!
This absence for a week was not a betrayal, it was not a fault against
her; it was nothing, yet it was everything. It was the end. She knew it.
She wished to cease. It was the consent of all the forces of her being.
She said to herself: "I have no reason to love him less. Do I love him
no more? Did I ever love him?" She did not know and she did not care to
know. Three years, during which there had been months when they had seen
each other every day--was all this nothing? Life is not a great thing.
And what one puts in it, how little that is!

In fine, she had nothing of which to complain. But it was better to end
it all. All these reflections brought her back to that point. It was not
a resolution; resolutions may be changed. It was graver: it was a state
of the body and of the mind.

When she arrived at the square, in the centre of which is a fountain,
and on one side of which stands a church of rustic style, showing its
bell in an open belfry, she recalled the little bouquet of violets that
he had given to her one night on the brid