"You do not know how happy I am; I am madly in love with her; but then she is ... she is ..." He did not finish his sentence, but he put the tips of his fingers to his lips with a gesture which signified:
"Divine! delicious! perfect!" and a good deal more besides.
I asked, laughing, "What! all that?"
"Everything that you can imagine," was his answer.
He introduced me to her. She was very pleasant, on easy terms with me, as was natural, and begged me to look upon their house as my own. I felt that he, Blérot, did not belong to me any longer. Our intimacy was altogether checked, and we hardly found a word to say to each other.
I soon took my leave, and shortly afterwards went to the East, and returned by way of Russia, Germany, Sweden, and Holland, after an absence of eighteen months from Paris.
The morning after my arrival, as I was walking along the boulevards to breathe the air once more, I saw a pale man with sunken cheeks coming towards me, who was as much like Blérot as it was possible for a physically emaciated man to be to a strong, ruddy, rather stout man. I looked at him in surprise, and asked myself: "Can it possibly be he?" But he saw me, and came towards me with outstretched arms, and we embraced in the middle of the boulevard.
After we had gone up and down once or twice from the Rue Druot to the Vaudeville Theater, just as we were taking leave of each other—for he already seemed quite done up with walking—I said to him:
"You don't look at all well. Are you ill?"
"I do feel rather out of sorts," was all he said.