an instant than other men can gather
during a whole lifetime!

THE THIEF

While apparently thinking of something else, Dr. Sorbier had been
listening quietly to those amazing accounts of burglaries and daring
deeds that might have been taken from the trial of Cartouche.
"Assuredly," he exclaimed, "assuredly, I know of no viler fault nor any
meaner action than to attack a girl's innocence, to corrupt her, to
profit by a moment of unconscious weakness and of madness, when her heart
is beating like that of a frightened fawn, and her pure lips seek those
of her tempter; when she abandons herself without thinking of the
irremediable stain, nor of her fall, nor of the morrow.

"The man who has brought this about slowly, viciously, who can tell with
what science of evil, and who, in such a case, has not steadiness and
self-restraint enough to quench that flame by some icy words, who has not
sense enough for two, who cannot recover his self-possession and master
the runaway brute within him, and who loses his head on the edge of the
precipice over which she is going to fall, is as contemptible as any man
who breaks open a lock, or as any rascal on the lookout for a house left
defenceless and unprotected or for some easy and dishonest stroke of
business, or as that thief whose various exploits you have just related
to us.

"I, for my part, utterly refuse to absolve him, even when extenuating
circumstances plead in his favor, even when he is carrying on a dangerous
flirtation, in which a man tries in vain to keep his balance, not to
exceed the limits of the game, any more than at lawn tennis; even when
the parts are inverted and a man's adversary is some precocious, curious,
seductive girl, who shows you immediately that she has nothing to learn
and nothing to experience, except the last chapter of love, one of those
girls from whom may fate always preserve our sons, and whom a
psychological novel writer has christened 'The Semi-Virgins.'

"It is, of course, difficult and painful for that coarse and unfathomable
vanity which is characteristic of every man, and which might be called
'malism', not to stir such a charming fire, difficult to act the Joseph
and the fool, to turn away his eyes, and, as it were, to put wax into his
ears, like the companions of Ulysses when they were attracted by the
divine, seductive songs of the Sirens, difficult only to touch that
pretty table covered with a perfectly new cloth, at which yo