oke. By degrees both find some reason for what
they wished to do, they think themselves idiots to lose the time which
will never return in that fashion, and so good-bye, and there you are!
That is how Josine Cadenette and that great idiot Servance separated."

Lalie Spring had lighted a cigarette, and the blue smoke played about
her fine, fair hair, and made one think of those last rays of the
setting sun which pierce through the clouds at sunset, and resting her
elbows on her knees, and with her chin in her hand in a dreamy attitude,
she murmured:

"Sad, isn't it?"

"Bah!" I replied, "at their age people easily console themselves, and
everything begins over again, even love!"

"Well, Josine had already found somebody else...."

"And did she tell you her story?"

"Of course she did, and it is such a joke!... You must know that
Servance is one of those fellows like one would wish to have when one
has time to amuse oneself, and so self-possessed that he would be
capable of ruining all the older ones in a girls' school, and given to
trifling as much as most men, so that Josine calls him 'perpetual
motion.' He would have liked to have gone on with his fun until the Day
of Judgment, and seemed to fancy that beds were not made to sleep in at
all, but she could not get used to being deprived of nearly all her
rest, and it really made her ill. But as she wished to be as
conciliatory as possible, and to love and to be loved as ardently as in
the past, and also to sleep off the effects of her happiness peacefully,
she rented a small room in a distant quarter, in a quiet, shady street
giving out that she had just come from the country, and put hardly any
furniture into it except a good bed and a dressing table. Then she
invented an old aunt for the occasion, who was ill and always grumbling,
and who suffered from heart disease and lived in one of the suburbs, and
so several times a week Josine took refuge in her sleeping place, and
used to sleep late there as if it had been some delicious abode where
one forgets the whole world. Sometimes they forgot to call her at the
proper time; she got back late, tired, with red and swollen eyelids,
involved herself in lies, contradicted herself and looked so much as if
she had just come from the confessional, feeling horribly ashamed of
herself, or, as if she had hurried home from some assignation, that at
last Servance worried himself about it, thought that he was being made a
fool of