.

"'Your own--as I cannot be in reality without wounding us both.'

"Then when I wrote a burning reply, this was brought by a maid on a dead
run:

"'Ah, if I were not afraid, afraid!--and you know you are just
as much afraid as I am--how I should fly to you! No, you cannot
hear the thousand conversations with which my soul fatigues
yours.... Oh, in my miserable existence there are hours when
madness seizes me. Judge for yourself. The whole night I spent
appealing to you furiously. I wept with exasperation. This
morning my husband came into the room. My eyes were bloodshot. I
began to laugh crazily, and when I could speak I said to him,
"What would you think of a person who, questioned as to his
profession, replied, 'I am a chamber succubus'?" "Ah, my dear,
you are ill," said he. "Worse than you think," said I.

"'But if I come to see you, what could we talk about, in the
state you yourself are in? Your letter has completely unbalanced
me. You arraign your malady with a certain brutality which makes
my body rejoice but alienates my soul a little. Ah, what if our
dreams could really come true!

"'Ah, say a word, just one word, from out your own heart. Don't
be afraid that even one of your letters can possibly fall into
other hands than mine.'

"So, so, so. This is getting to be no laughing matter," concluded
Durtal, folding up the letter. "The woman is married to a man who knows
me, it seems. What a situation! Let's see, now. Whom have I ever
visited?" He tried vainly to remember. No woman he had ever met at an
evening party would address such declarations to him. And that common
friend. "But I have no friends, except Des Hermies. I'd better try and
find out whom he has been seeing recently. But as a physician he meets
scores of people! And then, how can I explain to him? Tell him the
story? He will burst into a roar and disillusion me before I have got
halfway through the narrative."

And Durtal became irritated, for within him a really incomprehensible
phenomenon was taking place. He was burning for this unknown woman. He
was positively obsessed by her. He who had renounced all carnal
relations years ago, who, when the barns of his senses were opened,
contented himself with driving the disgusting herd of sin to the
commercial shambles to be summarily knocked in the head by the butcher
girls of love, he, he! was getting himself to b