When I had finished my letter I handed it to the Baron and asked him to read it.
"I never read other people's letters," he answered, with hypocritical pride.
"And I never write to another man's wife without that man's full knowledge of the correspondence."
He glanced at my letter, and, with an enigmatical smile, enclosed it in his own.
I saw nothing of him during the rest of the week, until I met him one evening at a street corner. He seemed very pleased to see me, and we went into a café to have a chat.
He had just returned from the country, where he had spent a few days with his wife's cousin. Without ever having met that charming person, I was easily able to draw a mental picture of her from the traces of her influence on the Baron's character. He had lost his haughtiness and his melancholy. There was a gay, somewhat dissipated look on his face, and he enriched his vocabulary by a few expressions of doubtful taste; even the tone of his voice was altered.
"A weak mind," I said to myself, "swayed by every emotion; a blank slate on which the lightest of women may write sense or folly, according to her sweet will."
He behaved like the hero in comic opera; he joked, told funny tales and was in boisterous spirits. His charm was gone with his uniform; and when, after supper, slightly intoxicated, he suggested that we should call on certain female friends of his, I thought him positively repulsive. With the exception of the neckpiece, the sash and the uniform, he really possessed no attractions whatever.
When his intoxication had reached its climax, he lost all sense of shame and began to discuss the secrets of his married life. I interrupted him indignantly and proposed that we should go home. He assured me that his wife allowed him full license during her absence. At first I thought this more than human, but later on it confirmed the opinion I had formed of the Baroness's naturally frigid temperament. We parted very early, and I returned to my room, my brain on fire with the indiscreet disclosure which I had been made to listen to.
This woman, although apparently in love with her husband, after a union of three years not only permitted him every freedom, but did so without claiming the same right for herself. It was strange, unnatural, like love without jealousy, light without shade. No! it was impossible; there must be another cause. He had told me the Baroness was naturally cold. That, too, seemed strange. Or was she really an embodiment of the virgin mother, such as I had already dimly divined? And was not chastity, purity of the soul, so closely linked to refinement of manners, a characteristic, an attribute of a superior race? I had not been deceived, then, in my youthful meditations when a young girl roused my admiration without in the least exciting my senses. Beautiful childish dreams! Charming ignorance of woman, that problem unspeakably more complex than a bachelor ever dreams of!