hammed had seen her
go out without seeing her return, and he repeated, in an exasperated
manner:--'Gone, _mo'ssieuia_; she has gone away!'

"I do not know why, but his conviction, the conviction that she had run
away with this vagabond, laid hold of me irresistibly in a moment. It
was absurd, unlikely, and yet certain in virtue of that very
unreasonableness, which constitutes female logic.

"Boiling over with indignation, I tried to recall the man's features, and
I suddenly remembered having seen him the previous week, standing on a
mound amidst his flock, and watching me. He was a tall Bedouin, the color
of whose bare limbs was blended with that of his rags; he was a type of a
barbarous brute, with high cheek bones, and a hooked nose, a retreating
chin, thin legs, and a tall carcass in rags, with the shifty eyes of a
jackal.

"I did not doubt for a moment that she had run away with that beggar.
Why? Because she was Allouma, a daughter of the desert. A girl from the
pavement in Paris would have run away with my coachman, or some thief in
the suburbs.

"'Very well,' I said to Mohammed. Then I got up, opened my window, and
began to draw in the stifling South wind, for the sirocco was blowing,
and I thought to myself:--

"Good heavens! she is ... a woman, like so many others. Does anybody know
what makes them act, what makes them love, what makes them follow, or
throw over a man? One certainly does know, occasionally; but often one
does not, and sometimes one is in doubt. Why did she run away with that
repulsive brute? Why? Perhaps, because the wind had been blowing
regularly from the South, for a month; that was enough; a breath of wind!
Does she know, do they know, even the cleverest of them, why they act?
No more than a weather-cock that turns with the wind. An imperceptible
breeze, makes the iron, brass, zinc, or wooden arrow revolve, just in
the same manner as some imperceptible influence, some undiscernible
impression moves the female heart, and urges it on to resolutions, and it
does not matter whether they belong to town or country, the suburbs or
the desert.

"They can then feel, provided that they reason and understand, why they
have done one thing rather than another, but, for the moment, they do
not know, for they are the playthings of their own sensibility, the
thoughtless, giddy-headed slaves of events, of their surroundings, of
chance meetings, and of all the sensations with which their soul and
thei