"What symptom?"
"A bad symptom, Hippolyte." Then, in a burst of mental agony, he exclaimed: "Oh, how horrible it is to love and yet not lose one's keenness of perception!"
She shook her head with a gesture of anger, and her face darkened. Once more, as on many previous occasions, hostility had risen between the two lovers. Each felt hurt by the injustice of suspicion, and secretly rebelled with that restrained anger which breaks out, from time to time, in brutal and irrevocable words, grave accusations and absurd recriminations. An indescribable fury seized them to torture themselves, to rend and martyrize their hearts.
Hippolyte became gloomy and silent. Her brows were knit in a frown and her lips were tightly pressed together. George regarded her with an irritating smile.
"Yes, that's how it will begin," he repeated, still smiling his disagreeable smile and fixing her with his keen glance. "You find at the bottom of your soul an inquietude, a sort of vague impatience which you cannot repress. When near me, you feel an instinctive repugnance arise in your breast against me—a repugnance which you cannot subdue. And then you become taciturn, you're obliged to make an enormous effort to speak to me at all; you misunderstand everything I say, and, perhaps unconsciously, you speak crossly even about the most trivial things."
She did not interrupt him even by so much as a gesture. Hurt by this indifference on her part, he continued to reproach her, spurred on to torment his companion not only by his sudden fit of temper, but also by a certain disinterested taste for investigation rendered the keener and the more literary by culture. He always tried to express himself with the accuracy and demonstrative precision which the works of the analysts had taught him; but, in the monologues, the formulas by which he interpreted his inner inquiry exaggerated and modified the mental condition under observation, while, in the dialogues, the preoccupation caused by being perspicacious often obscured the sincerity of his emotion and led him to err as to the secret motives which he claimed to discover in others. His brain, encumbered by a mass of psychological observations, personal or gathered from books, ended by confounding and confusing everything both as regarded himself and others.
He continued:
"Mind you, I make no reproach. I know it is not your fault. Every human soul has but a fixed quantity of sensitiveness for passion. It is inevitable that this quantity is exhausted in time and that no power can prevent the cessation of passion. Now, you have already loved me for a long time—almost two years! It will be the second anniversary of our love on the second of April. Had you thought of it?"
She nodded. He repeated, as if to himself: "Two years!"
They approached a bench and sat down. Hippolyte sank down with a weary sigh, as if overcome by an enervating weakness. The heavy black coach of a prelate passed by on the road below, the wheels rattling on the uneven cobblestones. The faint sound of a bugle came from the Flaminian Road, and then once more silence regained possession of the surrounding groves. A few drops of rain fell.