k.

"Ah!" She reflected, blinking her troubled eyes. "At any rate," she
said, again facing him squarely, "you could not have recognized me in
the first letters, to which you responded with cries of passion. Those
cries were not addressed to me."

He contested this observation, and became entangled in the dates and
happenings and in the sequence of the notes. She at length lost the
thread of his remarks. The situation was so ridiculous that both were
silent. Then she sat down and burst out laughing.

Her strident, shrill laugh, revealing magnificent, but short and pointed
teeth, in a mocking mouth, vexed him.

"She has been playing with me," he said to himself, and dissatisfied
with the turn the conversation had taken, and furious at seeing this
woman so calm, so different from her burning letters, he asked, in a
tone of irritation, "Am I to know why you laugh?"

"Pardon me. It's a trick my nerves play on me, sometimes in public
places. But never mind. Let us be reasonable and talk things over. You
tell me you love me--"

"And I mean it."

"Well, admitting that I too am not indifferent, where is this going to
lead us? Oh, you know so well, you poor dear, that you refused, right at
first, the meeting which I asked in a moment of madness--and you gave
well-thought-out reasons for refusing."

"But I refused because I did not know then that you were the women in
the case! I have told you that it was several days later that Des
Hermies unwittingly revealed your identity to me. Did I hesitate as soon
as I knew? No! I immediately implored you to come."

"That may be, but you admit that I'm right when I claim that you wrote
your first letters to another and not me."

She was pensive for a moment. Durtal began to be prodigiously bored by
this discussion. He thought it more prudent not to answer, and was
seeking a change of subject that would put an end to the deadlock.

She herself got him out of his difficulty. "Let us not discuss it any
more," she said, smiling, "we shall not get anywhere. You see, this is
the situation: I am married to a very nice man who loves me and whose
only crime is that he represents the rather insipid happiness which one
has right at hand. I started this correspondence with you, so I am to
blame, and believe me, on his account I suffer. You have work to do,
beautiful books to write. You don't need to have a crazy woman come
walking into your life. So, you see, the best thing is for us to re