and making ready, or when I am on the
way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal
to everything!

This fills my life. Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears
it. All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared. When
they say in my presence of some young woman that, "she is not happy," a
thrill of joy tears through me.

On Sundays, among the crowds, I have often felt my heart tighten with
distress as I watch the unknown women. Reverie has often held me all
day because of one who has gone by and disappeared, leaving me a clear
vision of her curtained room, and of herself, vibrating like a harp.
She, perhaps, was the one I should have always loved; she whom I seek
gropingly, desperately, from each to the next. Ah, what a delightful
thing to see and to think of a distant woman always is, whoever she may
be!

There are moments when I suffer, and am to be pitied. Assuredly, if
one could read me really, no one would pity me. And yet all men are
like me. If they are gifted with acceptable physique they dream of
headlong adventures, they attempt them, and our heart never stands
still. But no one acknowledges that, no one, ever.

Then, there were the women who turned me a cold shoulder; and among
them all Madame Pierron, a beautiful and genteel woman of twenty-five
years, with her black fillets and her marble profile, who still
retained the obvious awkwardness and vacant eye of young married women.
Tranquil, staid and silent, she came and went and lived, totally blind
to my looks of admiration.

This perfect unconcern aggravated my passion. I remember my pangs one
morning in June, when I saw some feminine linen spread upon the green
hedge within her garden. The delicate white things marshaled there
were waiting, stirred by the leaves and the breeze; so that Spring lent
them frail shape and sweetness--and life. I remember, too, a gaunt
house, scorching in the sun, and a window which flashed and then shut!
The window stayed shut, like a slab. All the world was silent; and
that splendid living being was walled up there. And last, I have
recollection of an evening when, in the bluish and dark green and
chalky landscape of the town and its rounded gardens, I saw that window
lighted up. A narrow glimmer of rose and gold was enframed there, and
I could distinguish, leaning on the sill that overhung the town, in the
heart of that resplendence, a feminine form which stir