only friends, with a man. But it would be very nice to come
and see you without having evil thoughts to fear, wouldn't it?" She was
silent. Then she added, "Yes, just to see each other--and if we did not
have any sublime things to say to each other, it is also very nice to
sit and say nothing!"

Then she said, "My time is up. I must go home."

"And leave me with no hope?" he exclaimed, kissing her gloved hands.

She did not answer, but gently shook her head, then, as he looked
pleadingly at her, she said, "Listen. If you will promise to make no
demands on me and to be good, I will come here night after next at nine
o'clock."

He promised whatever she wished. And as he raised his head from her
hands and as his lips brushed lightly over her breast, which seemed to
tighten, she disengaged her hands, caught his nervously, and, clenching
her teeth, offered her neck to his lips. Then she fled.

"Oof!" he said, closing the door after her. He was at the same time
satisfied and vexed.

Satisfied, because he found her enigmatic, changeful, charming. Now that
he was alone he recalled her to memory. He remembered her tight black
dress, her fur cloak, the warm collar of which had caressed him as he
was covering her neck with kisses. He remembered that she wore no
jewellery, except sparkling blue sapphire eardrops. He remembered the
wayward blonde hair escaping from under the dark green otter hat.
Holding his hands to his nostrils he sniffed again the sweet and distant
odour, cinnamon lost among stronger perfumes, which he had caught from
the contact of her long, fawn-coloured suede gloves, and he saw again
her moist, rodent teeth, her thin, bitten lips, and her troubled eyes,
of a grey and opaque lustre which could suddenly be transfigured with
radiance. "Oh, night after next it will be great to kiss all that!"

Vexed also, both with himself and with her. He reproached himself with
having been brusque and reserved. He ought to have shown himself more
expansive and less restrained. But it was her fault, for she had abashed
him! The incongruity between the woman who cried with voluptuous
suffering in her letters and the woman he had seen, so thoroughly
mistress of herself in her coquetries, was truly too much!

"However you look at them, these women are astonishing creatures," he
thought. "Here is one who accomplishes the most difficult thing you can
imagine: coming to a man's room after having written him excessive
letters.