I spent the evening at home, anxious and uneasy, waiting for telegrams from the seat of war. To distract my thoughts, I emptied a sack containing old books and papers on the floor, and sat down among this litter to examine and classify it. But I found it impossible to concentrate my thoughts on my task; I stretched myself out at full length, resting the back of my head on my hands and, my eyes fixed with a hypnotic stare on the candles burning in the old chandelier, I lost myself in a reverie. I was longing for her kisses, and thinking out plans of making her my own. As she was sensitive and strange, I felt that the utmost delicacy would be necessary, that I must allow matters to arrange themselves; that a single clumsy movement would spoil everything.
I lighted a cigarette and imagined that I was lying in a meadow; it amused me to view my little room from below. Everything seemed new to me. The sofa, the witness of many pleasant hours, brought me back to my dreams of love, which, however, were quickly paralysed by the fear that happiness would be wrecked on the rocks of my uncompromising principles.
Analysing the thought which had checked my ardour, I discovered in it a great deal of cowardice, fear of the consequences, a little sympathy with the man who stood in danger of being betrayed, a little disgust with the unclean pell-mell; a little genuine respect for the woman whom I could not bear to see degrading herself; a little pity with the daughter, a mere nothing of compassion with the mother of my beloved, in case of a scandal; and quite in the background of my miserable heart a vague presentiment of the difficulty I should find later on, if ever I should wish to sever our connection.
"No," I said to myself, "all or nothing! She must be mine alone, and for ever!"
While I was thus musing, there came a gentle tapping at my door, and almost simultaneously a lovely head appeared in the opening, flooding my attic with sunshine, and with its roguish smile drawing me away from my papers into the arms of my beloved. After a hailstorm of kisses on her lips, which were fresh with the cold outside, I asked—
"Well, what has he decided to do?"
"Nothing! I haven't told him yet!"
"Then you are lost! Flee, unhappy woman!"
And keeping firm hold of her, I took off her close-fitting fur coat, removed her beaded hat and drew her to the fire. Then she found words.
"I hadn't the courage.... I wanted to see you once again before the catastrophe, for God knows, he may decide to divorce me...."