le fits have come upon you rather late in
the day, have they not? A little valerian and quinine, made up into
silver-coated pills, is a sovereign remedy."

"You are making fun of me."

"No," she said. "But it was so easy then, seeing that the recollection
of me could inspire you with so many poetic ideas and cause you to trot
along for such a distance behind plumed toques--it was so easy not to
take the train for Milan and not to fly away from me as one skips from a
creditor."

Guy could not refrain from smiling.

"Ah! it is because--I loved you too dearly!"

"I know that!" exclaimed Marianne with a tone, in contrast with her
elegance, of an artist's model giving a pupil a retort. "A madrigal that
has not answered, no; does it rain?"

"I have perhaps been stupid, how can it be helped?" said Lissac.

"Do not doubt it, my dear friend. It is always stupid to deprive one's
self of the woman who adores one. Such rarities are not common."

"You remember, dear Marianne," said Guy, "the day when you boldly wrote
upon the photographs to some one who loved you dearly: 'To him I love
more than every one else in the world?'"

"Yes," said Marianne, blowing a cloud of smoke upward. "Such things as
that are never forgotten when one writes them with the least sincerity."

"And you were sincere?"

"On the faith of an honest man," she answered laughingly.

"And yet I have been assured since that time, that you adored another
before that one."

"It is possible," said Marianne with sudden bitterness; "but, in the
life that I have led, I have been so often purchased that I have been
more than once able to mistake for love the pleasure that I have
derived."

In those words, uttered sharply, and in a hissing tone like the stroke
of a whip-lash in the air, she had expressed so much suffering and
hidden anger that Lissac was strangely affected.

Guy, the Parisian, experienced a sentiment altogether curious and
unexpected, and this woman whose bare neck was resting on the back of
the armchair, allowing the smoke that issued from her lips in puffs to
enter her quivering nostrils, seemed to him a new creature, a stranger
who had come there to tempt him. In her languishing and, as it were,
abandoned pose, he followed the outline of her graceful body, blooming
in its youth, the fulness of her bust, the lines of her skirt closely
clinging to her exquisite hips, and the unlooked-for return of the lost
mistress, the forgotten one, as