bow, resting her cheek in her hand.

"You are the first, really you are, I am not lying: the others don't
exist."

He felt no jealousy in respect of the past; he had no fear of
comparisons. He questioned her:

"Then the others?"

"To begin with, there were only two: my professor, and he of course
doesn't count, and there was the man I told you about, a solid sort of a
person, whom my mother saddled me with."

"No more?"

"I swear it."

"And Chevalier?"

"Chevalier? He? Good gracious, no! You wouldn't have had me look at
him!"

"And the solid sort of person found by your mother, he, too, does not
count any more?"

"I assure you that, with you, I am another woman. It's the solemn truth
that you are the first to possess me. It's queer, all the same.
Directly I set eyes on you I wanted you. Quite suddenly I felt I must
have you. I felt it somehow. What? I should find it very hard to say.
Oh, I didn't stop to think. With your conventional, stiff, frigid
manners, and your appearance, like a curly-haired little wolf, you
pleased me, that was all! And now I could not do without you. No,
indeed, I couldn't."

He assured her that on her surrender he had been deliciously surprised;
he said all sorts of pretty, caressing things, all of which had been
said before.

Taking his head in her hands, she said:

"You have really the teeth of a wolf. I think it was your teeth that
made me want you the first day. Bite me!"

He pressed her to his bosom, and felt her firm supple body respond to
his embrace. Suddenly she released herself:

"Don't you hear the gravel creaking?"

"No."

"Listen: I can hear a sound of footsteps on the path."

Sitting upright, her body bent forward, she strained her ears.

He was disappointed, excited, irritated, and perhaps his self-esteem was
slightly hurt.

"What has come over you? It's absurd."

She cried very sharply:

"Do hold your tongue!"

She was listening intently to a slight sound, near at hand, as of
breaking branches.

Suddenly she leapt from the bed with such instinctive agility, with a
movement so like the rapid spring of a young animal, that Ligny,
although by no means of a literary turn of mind, thought of the cat
metamorphosed into a woman.

"Are you crazy? Where are you going?"

Raising a corner of the curtain, she wiped the moisture from the corner
of a pane, and peered out through the window. She saw nothing but the
night. The noise had ceased altogether.