f.

Everything had happened so rapidly, that she had had no time to think, to
reflect, to say to herself: "What does he want with me?" no time even to
recover herself.

A kiss, a violent emotion, a transient indignation, a struggle for a few
seconds, a sharp pain, and that was all; the crime was consummated, she had
lost her honour, and that was love!

She wished not to believe it, but her disordered corsage, her dishevelled
hair upon her bare shoulders, her crumpled dressing-gown, and more than all
that, the violent leaping of her heart, told her that she was not dreaming.

He was gone, the priest; he had fled away into the night, happy and light
of heart, leaving her alone with her shame, and the ulcer of remorse in her
soul.

And then big tears rolled down her cheeks and fell upon her breasts, still
burning with his feverish caresses. "It is all over! it is all over. Where
is my virginity?"

Weep, poor girl, weep, for that virginity is already far away, and nothing,
it is said, flees faster than the illusion which departs, if it be not a
virginity which flies away.

And a vague terror was mingled with her remorse.

The first apprehension which strikes brutally against the edifice of
illusions of the woman who has committed a fault, is the anxiety regarding
the opinion of the man who has incited her to that fault; I am speaking, be
it understood, of one in whom there remains the feeling of modesty, without
which she is not a woman, but an unclean female.

When she awakes from her short delirium, she says to herself:

--What will he think of me? What will he believe? Will he not despise me?

And she has good grounds for apprehension; for often (I believe I have said
so already) the contempt of her accomplice is all that remains to her.

And then, what man is there who, after having at length possessed
_illegitimately_ the wife or the maiden so long pursued and desired, does
not say to himself in the morning, when his fever is dissipated, when the
bandage which hitherto has covered the eyes of love _suppliant_, is unbound
from the eyes of love _satisfied_, when the _unknown_ which has so many
charms, has become the _known_ that we despise, when of the rosy, inflated
illusion there remains but a yellow skeleton: "She has given herself to me
trustingly and artlessly; but might she not have given herself with equal
facility to another, if I had not been there? for in fact ... what
devil...?"

A strange quest