"Adored one!" he murmured.
"Addio!" she rejoined softly. "Think of me until eleven."
"Addio!"
They separated at the foot of the Via Gregoriana. She went down the Via Capo-le-Case. As long as he could see her going along the wet pavement, lit up by the reflection of the shop windows, his gaze followed her.
"Thus it is," he thought. "She leaves me; she enters a house of which I know nothing; she reënters upon her commonplace life, despoiled of all the ideality in which I have clothed her; she becomes another woman entirely. I no longer know her. The gross necessities of life occupy her, absorb her, and degrade her...."
A perfume of violets was carried to him from a florist's close by, and his heart swelled with confused aspirations.
"Ah! why is it not permitted us to conform our existence according to our dreams, and to live forever in ourselves alone?"
CHAPTER II.
At ten o'clock in the morning George was still buried in the profound and refreshing slumber which, in the young, follows a night of voluptuousness, when his servant entered to awaken him.
Turning in his bed, he cried ill-humoredly: