. Afterward, when his
director gave him leave to spend his passion, he had made a habit of
this daily perdition and would redeem the same by ecstasies of faith,
which were full of pious humility. Very naively he offered heaven,
by way of expiatory anguish, the abominable torment from which he was
suffering. This torment grew and increased, and he would climb his
Calvary with the deep and solemn feelings of a believer, though steeped
in a harlot's fierce sensuality. That which made his agony most poignant
was this woman's continued faithlessness. He could not share her with
others, nor did he understand her imbecile caprices. Undying, unchanging
love was what he wished for. However, she had sworn, and he paid her as
having done so. But he felt that she was untruthful, incapable of
common fidelity, apt to yield to friends, to stray passers-by, like a
good-natured animal, born to live minus a shift.

One morning when he saw Foucarmont emerging from her bedroom at an
unusual hour, he made a scene about it. But in her weariness of his
jealousy she grew angry directly. On several occasions ere that she had
behaved rather prettily. Thus the evening when he surprised her with
Georges she was the first to regain her temper and to confess herself
in the wrong. She had loaded him with caresses and dosed him with soft
speeches in order to make him swallow the business. But he had ended
by boring her to death with his obstinate refusals to understand the
feminine nature, and now she was brutal.

"Very well, yes! I've slept with Foucarmont. What then? That's flattened
you out a bit, my little rough, hasn't it?"

It was the first time she had thrown "my little rough" in his teeth. The
frank directness of her avowal took his breath away, and when he began
clenching his fists she marched up to him and looked him full in the
face.

"We've had enough of this, eh? If it doesn't suit you you'll do me the
pleasure of leaving the house. I don't want you to go yelling in my
place. Just you get it into your noodle that I mean to be quite free.
When a man pleases me I go to bed with him. Yes, I do--that's my way!
And you must make up your mind directly. Yes or no! If it's no, out you
may walk!"

She had gone and opened the door, but he did not leave. That was her way
now of binding him more closely to her. For no reason whatever, at the
slightest approach to a quarrel she would tell him he might stop or
go as he liked, and she would accomp