ter with you? You seem unhappy. What do you want?" she
replied:

"Nothing. Happiness exists only in our dreams, in this world."

Avancelle came to see her the next summer, and she received him without
any emotion, and without regret, for she suddenly perceived that she had
never loved him, except in a dream, from which Paul Peronel had brutally
roused her.

But the young man, who still adored her, thought as he returned to Paris:

"Women are really very strange, complicated and inexplicable beings."

IN THE SPRING

When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes
its garment of verdure, when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on our
faces and fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate to our heart, we
feel vague longings for undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at
random, to inhale the spring. As the winter had been very severe the year
before, this longing assumed an intoxicating feeling in May; it was like
a superabundance of sap.

Well, one morning on waking, I saw from my window the blue sky glowing in
the sun above the neighboring houses. The canaries hanging in the windows
were singing loudly, and so were the servants on every floor; a cheerful
noise rose up from the streets, and I went out, with my spirits as bright
as the day was, to go--I did not exactly know where. Everybody I met
seemed to be smiling; an air of happiness appeared to pervade everything,
in the warm light of returning spring. One might almost have said that a
breeze of love was blowing through the city, and the young women whom I
saw in the streets in their morning toilettes, in the depths of whose
eyes there lurked a hidden tenderness, and who walked with languid grace,
filled my heart with agitation.

Without knowing how or why, I found myself on the banks of the Seine.
Steamboats were starting for Suresnes, and suddenly I was seized by an
unconquerable wish to have a walk through the woods. The deck of the
_mouche_[1] was crowded with passengers, for the sun in early spring
draws you out of the house, in spite of yourself, and everybody moves
about, goes and comes, and talks to his neighbor.

[Footnote 1: Fly.]

I had a female neighbor; a little work-girl, no doubt, who possessed
the true Parisian charm; a little head, with light curly hair, which
looked like frizzed light, came down to her ears and descended to the
nape of her neck, danced in the wind, and then became such fine, such
li