d: "I tell you that you are in love. You
speak of her with the magniloquence of a poet and the feeling of a
troubadour. Come, search your heart, and confess."

Servigny walked a few steps without answering. Then he replied:

"That is possible, after all. In any case, she fills my mind almost
continually. Yes, perhaps I am in love. I dream about her too much.
I think of her when I am asleep and when I awake--that is surely a
grave indication. Her face follows me, accompanies me ceaselessly,
ever before me, around me, with me. Is this love, this physical
infatuation? Her features are so stamped upon my vision that I see
her the moment I shut my eyes. My heart beats quickly every time I
look at her, I don't deny it."

"So I am in love with her, but in a queer fashion. I have the
strongest desire for her, and yet the idea of making her my wife
would seem to me a folly, a piece of stupidity, a monstrous thing:
And I have a little fear of her, as well, the fear which a bird
feels over which a hawk is hovering."

"And again I am jealous of her, jealous of all of which I am
ignorant in her incomprehensible heart. I am always wondering: 'Is
she a charming youngster or a wretched jade?' She says things that
would make an army shudder; but so does a parrot. She is at times so
indiscreet and yet modest that I am forced to believe in her
spotless purity, and again so incredibly artless that I must suspect
that she has never been chaste. She allures me, excites me, like a
woman of a certain category, and at the same time acts like an
impeccable virgin. She seems to love me and yet makes fun of me; she
deports herself in public as if she were my mistress and treats me
in private as if I were her brother or footman."

"There are times when I fancy that she has as many lovers as her
mother. And at other times I imagine that she suspects absolutely
nothing of that sort of life, you understand. Furthermore, she is a
great novel reader. I am at present, while awaiting something
better, her book purveyor. She calls me her 'librarian.' Every week
the New Book Store sends her, on my orders, everything new that has
appeared, and I believe that she reads everything at random. It must
make a strange sort of mixture in her head."

"That kind of literary hasty-pudding accounts perhaps for some of
the girl's peculiar ways. When a young woman looks at existence
through the medium of fifteen thousand novels, she must see it in a
strange light