adventure. And then, that bitter remark, spoken in the course of their light Parisian gossip, whetted his curiosity still further and awoke, perhaps, all the latent force of a passion formerly suddenly severed.
He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young woman's clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that nimbly eluded his grasp. The movement of his hands suggested the embrace that his feelings prompted.
Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for the future:
"Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?"
Lissac smiled.
"Come," she said, "nonsense! That is a romance whose pages you have already often turned over."
"The romance of my life," whispered Lissac in Marianne's ear.
"The more reason that it should not be read again. It is true there are books one never reads but once. And for that reason, probably, one never forgets them."
She rose abruptly, threw the stump of her cigarette into the fire and looked with a bright, penetrating glance, into Lissac's surprised eyes.
"Ah! it is a long while, you see, since you spoke laughingly—we have both heartily laughed at it—of the 'caprices of Marianne.' Do you know what I am, my dear Guy? Yes, where is the mad creature who was formerly your mistress? Abandoned to dark, profound and incurable ennui, I yawn my life away, as some one said, I yawn it away even to the point of dislocating my jaw. The days seem dull to me, people stupid, books insipid, while fools seem idiots and witty people fools. It is to have the blues, if you will, or rather to have the grays, to hate colorless objects, to be weary of the commonplace, to thirst for the impossible. A thirst that cannot be allayed, let me add. The pure, fresh spring that should slake my thirst has not yet gushed."
She talked in a dry, bitter tone, with a smile that frequently gave way to slight outbreaks of convulsive laughter almost as if she were attacked with a fit of coughing. From time to time, she blew away a cloud of smoke that escaped from her lips, for she had resumed her cigarette, or with the tip of her nail struck her papelito, knocking the ashes on the carpet.
Moved and greatly puzzled, but no longer thinking of the temptation of a moment before, Guy looked at her and nodded his head gravely, like a physician who finds a patient's illness more serious than the latter is willing to acknowledge.
"You are very unhappy, Marianne!" he remarked.
"I? Nonsense! Weary, disgusted, bored, yes; but not unhappy. There is still something great in misery. That can be battled against. It is like thunder. But the rain, the eternal rain, incessantly falling, with its liquid mud, that—ah! that, ugh! that is crushing. And in my life it rains, it rains with terrible constancy."
As she uttered these words, she stretched her arms out with a movement that expressed boundless weariness and disclosed to Guy the dull dejection that followed a great deception and a hopeless fall.
"Life? My life? A mere millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I abandon to others—whom I have abandoned, thank God! for I am satiated at length and have now no lover, nor do I desire one. I desire to be my own mistress, in short, and not the mistress of any person. I have but one desire, hear—"
"What?" asked Guy, who was deeply moved by this outburst of anger and suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his feelings vacillating between doubt and pity.
"My pleasure," Marianne replied, "is to shut myself up alone in a little room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage saved from my past life: books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not what. My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name, whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past loves, everything, in fact, a secret. I shall cloister myself. I shall stretch myself out on a reclining-chair and think that if, by chance—as happens sometimes—an aneurism, a congestion, or I don't know what, should strike me down in that solitude, no one would know who I am, nobody, nobody, and my body would be taken to the Morgue, or to the grave, it matters little to me, that body of which the little otter-trimmed toques recall to you the graceful, serpentine line. Ah! those plans are not very lively, are they? Well, my dear, such are my good moments. Judge of the others, then."
Lissac was profoundly stirred and very greatly puzzled. To call on him: that implied a need of him. But there was no attempt to find the marker at the place where the romance had been interrupted: therefore the visit was not to renew the relations that had been severed, yet not broken.
What, then, brought this creature, still charming and giddy, whose heart was gnawed and wrung with grief? And was she the woman—Guy knew her so well!—to return thus, only to conjure up the vanished recollections, to communicate the secret of her present sorrows and to permit Lissac to inhale the odor of a departed perfume, more airy than the blue smoke-wreaths that escaped from her cigarette?
After entrusting Guy with the secret of her yearning for solitude, she again indulged in her sickly smile, and still looking at Guy:
"You are, I am told, a constant guest at Sabine Marsy's receptions?" she said abruptly.
"Yes," replied Lissac. "But I have no great liking for political salons."
"It is a political centre, and yet not, seemingly. It is about to become a scientific one, if one may believe the reporters—Monsieur de Rosas is announced.—By the way, my dear Guy, you still see Monsieur de Rosas!"
While Marianne uttered this name with an indifferent tone, she slightly bent her head in order to scrutinize Guy.
He did not reply at once, seeking first to discover what object Marianne had in speaking to him about De Rosas. In a vague way he surmised that the great Castilian noble counted for something in Marianne's visit.
"I always see him when he is in Paris," he said after a moment's pause.
"Then you will see him very soon, for he will arrive to-morrow."
"Who told you that?"
"The newspapers. You don't read the newspapers, then?—He is returning from the East. Madame Marsy is bent on his narrating his travels, on the occasion of a special soirée. A lecture! Our Rosas must have altered immensely. He was wild enough of old."
"A shy fellow, which is quite different. But," asked Lissac after a moment, "what about Rosas?"
"Tell me, in the first place, that you know perfectly well that he will arrive to-morrow."
"I know it through the reporters, as you say. To-day, it is through the reporters that one learns news of one's friends."
"The important fact is that you know him, and it is because I am particularly anxious to hear Monsieur de Rosas that I come to ask you to present me at Madame Marsy's."
"Oh! that is it?" Guy began.
"Yes, that is it. I am weary. I am crazy over the Orient. You remember Félicien David's Desert that I used to play for you on the piano? I would like to hear this story of travel. It would make me forget Paris."
"You
