the soft, eider down cushions like a cat, and so is appeased, and
in spite of herself, thinks of sin at the sight of the low, wide couch,
which is so suitable for caresses, of the heavy curtains, which quite
deaden the sound of voices and of laughter, and of the flowers that
scent the air, and whose smell lingers on the folds of the hangings.

"They were rooms in which a woman forgets time, where she begins by
accepting a cup of tea and nibbling a sweet cake, and abandons her
fingers timidly and with regret to other fingers which tremble, and are
hot, and so by degrees she loses her head and succumbs.

"I do not know whether the piano brought us ill luck, but Lalie had not
even time to learn four songs before she disappeared like the wind, just
as she had come, _flick-flack_, good-night, good-bye; perhaps from
spite, because she had found letters from other women on my table,
perhaps to renew her advertisement, as she was not one of those to hang
onto one man and become a fixture.

"I had not been in love with her, certainly, but yet it always has some
effect on a man; it breaks a spring when a woman leaves you, and you
think that you must start again, risk it, and go in for forbidden sport
in which one is exposed to knocks, common sport that one has been
through a hundred times before, and which provides you with nothing to
show for it.

"Nothing is more unpleasant than to lend your apartments to a friend, to
have to say to yourself that someone is going to disturb the mysterious
intimacy which really exists between the actual owner and his furniture,
the soul of those past kisses which floats in the air; that the room
whose tints you connect with some recollection, some dream, some sweet
vision, and whose colors you have tried to make harmonize with certain
fair-haired, pink-skinned girls, is going to become a common-place
lodging, like the rooms in an ordinary lodging house, which are suitable
to hidden crime and to evanescent love affairs.

"However, poor Stanis had begged me so urgently to do him that service;
he was so very much in love with Madame de Frejus, and among the
characters in the play there was a brute of a husband who was terribly
jealous and suspicious; one of those Othellos who have always a flea in
their ear, and come back unexpectedly from shooting or the club, who
pick up pieces of torn paper, listen at doors, smell out meetings with
the nose of a detective, and seem to have been sent into th