ich now
exasperated him. "Yet I'm not really angry," he assured himself, "when I
see how she longs to run away and scratch from maggots in that
dunghill of cacophony. I'm disappointed; not for myself, but for her;
disappointed to find that, after living for more than six months in
daily contact with myself, she has not been capable of improving her
mind even to the point of spontaneously eradicating from it a taste for
Victor Masse! More than that, to find that she has not arrived at the
stage of understanding that there are evenings on which anyone with
the least shade of refinement of feeling should be willing to forego
an amusement when she is asked to do so. She ought to have the sense to
say: 'I shall not go,' if it were only from policy, since it is by what
she answers now that the quality of her soul will be determined once and
for all." And having persuaded himself that it was solely, after all,
in order that he might arrive at a favourable estimate of Odette's
spiritual worth that he wished her to stay at home with him that evening
instead of going to the Opera-Comique, he adopted the same line of
reasoning with her, with the same degree of insincerity as he had
used with himself, or even with a degree more, for in her case he was
yielding also to the desire to capture her by her own self-esteem.

"I swear to you," he told her, shortly before she was to leave for the
theatre, "that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a
selfish man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have
a thousand other things to do this evening, and I shall feel that I have
been tricked and trapped myself, and shall be thoroughly annoyed, if,
after all, you tell me that you are not going. But my occupations, my
pleasures are not everything; I must think of you also. A day may come
when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to
reproach me with not having warned you at the decisive hour in which
I felt that I was going to pass judgment on you, one of those stern
judgments which love cannot long resist. You see, your _Nuit de
Cleopatre_ (what a title!) has no bearing on the point. What I must know
is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of
mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are
incapable of foregoing a pleasure. For if you are such, how could anyone
love you, for you are not even a person, a definite, imperfect, but at
least perc