"'Certainly not. It is the foundation of a family, the child. That alone gives marriage a positive value. After the birth of the child life ceases to be a search for happiness. That event ends that period of sentimental restlessness of which Nature no longer takes notice. And if it is not suppressed, at any rate, it maintains a fixed course from which we can never stray with impunity.'
"As she listened to me without replying, I picked up a volume of Byron which she was translating.
"'Be careful of these romanticists. Their bouquets are poisoned. They make the world reflect their point of view. They believe we have every right to the highest realization, and that our personality creates the worth of the world. The more unbridled it is, the more powerful it seems to them. They add the decadence of their emotions to that of their minds.'
"From intellectual habit, I waxed enthusiastic in this defense of the social order, to which I have devoted so much thought and effort. She looked at me with her golden eyes, which can assume fleeting expression of unutterable woe—when they become like those of wild beasts in their cage: she said nothing, but her look disturbed me.
"'So,' she said at last, 'if love comes too late, it is not worthy of a sacrifice?'
"I had not foreseen what one must always foresee with a woman, however intelligent: the immediate application of our general ideas to the present experiences.
"'Yes,' she answered in her musical voice, 'the earth bums a long time with a slow fire. And one can always break one's heart. Is it not so?'
"These words were uttered in such an impersonal manner that any personal allusion was excluded. I could not discover in them the confession I was trembling to find. I was silent. In venturing into this discussion, I did not expect to be struck with my own weapons.
"Darkness, although not precipitated by the half-stripped trees near the avenue, was gradually coming on. And I carried away from her home an uncertainty, an unspeakable distress."
"October 20th: Nobody knows I have returned to Paris. However, finding Mlle. de Sézery's door shut, I paid a visit to my old friend, Doctor Heaume, who is incurably ill, as a result of excessive expenditure of mental energy. I found him seated, or rather strapped to his work table from which he no longer has strength to rise. Only his eyes are alive and pitiful. One knows from a distance that his cheeks are already paralyzed. With superhuman energy, he is completing his treatise on nervous diseases. Then he will die.