' She said she did. Oh, the horrid woman!

"But it was not enough to be afraid. I had to hate my ennui. How did
I come to hate it? I do not know.

"I no longer knew myself. I no longer was myself. I had such need of
something else. In fact, I did not know my own name any more.

"One day, I remember (although I am not wicked) I had a happy dream
that my husband was dead, my poor husband who had done nothing to me,
and that I was free, free, as large as the world!

"It could not last. I couldn't go on forever hating monotony so much.
Oh, that emptiness, that monotony! Of all the gloomy things in the
world monotony is the darkest, the gloomiest. In comparison night is
day.

"Religion? It is not with religion that we fill the emptiness of our
days, it is with our own life. It was not with beliefs, with ideas
that I had to struggle, it was with myself.

"Then I found the remedy!"

She almost cried, hoarsely, ecstatically:

"Sin, sin! To rid myself of boredom by committing a crime, to break up
monotony by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person, another
person. To hate life worse than it hated me. To sin so as not to die.

"I met you. You wrote verses and books. You were different from the
rest. Your voice vibrated and gave the impression of beauty, and above
all, you were there, in my existence, in front of me! I had only to
hold out my arms. Then I loved you with all my heart, if you can call
it love, my poor little friend!"

She spoke now in a low quick voice, both oppressed and enthusiastic,
and she played with her companion's hand as if it were a child's toy.

"And you, too, you loved me, naturally. And when we slipped into a
hotel one evening, the first time, it seemed to me as if the door
opened of itself, and I was grateful for having rebelled and having
broken my destiny. And then the deceit--from which we suffer sometimes,
but which, after reflection, we no longer detest--the risks, the dangers
that give pleasure to each minute, the complications that add variety
to life, these rooms, these hiding-places, these black prisons, which
have fled from the sunlight I once knew!

"Ah!" she said.

It seemed to me that she sighed as if, now that her aspiration was
realized, she had nothing so beautiful to hope for any more.

. . . . .

She thought a moment, and then said:

"See what we are. I too may have believed at first in a sort of
thunderbolt, a supernatural and fatal a