‘It was furiously galante,’ she answered with a tragic smile. He walked slowly up to her, half smiling all the time, sat down on her bed, and put his arm around her.
‘You are cruelly unhappy, my poor one, I know. But ’twill pass, in time all caprices yield to graver things.’
‘But it is no caprice!’ she cried passionately. ‘Oh, Jacques, it is hard to make my meaning clear, but they be real live people with their own pursuits ... they are all square like little fat boxes ... oh, how can I make you understand?’
Jacques could not help laughing. ‘I’m sure, ’tis hateful of them to be like boxes; though, in truth, for my part, I am to seek ... oh, Madeleine, dear life, it’s dreadful to be miserable ... the cursed phantasia, what tricks it plays us ... ’tis a mountebank, don’t heed it but put your faith in the good old bourgeois intellect,’ but Madeleine, ignoring this comfort from Gassendi, moaned out,—
‘Oh! Jacques! I want to die ... you see, ’tis this way—they’ve got their own lives and memories, folded up all tight around them. Oh! can no one ever get to know any one else?’
He began to understand.
‘Indeed one can, but it takes time. One has to hew a path through the blood, through the humours, up to the brain, and, once there, create the Passion of Admiration. How can it be done at once?’
‘I can’t wait ... I can’t wait ... except things come at once I’ll have none of them ... at least that’s not quite my meaning,’ she added hurriedly, looking furtively round and crossing herself several times. ‘Oh! but I don’t feel that I am of a humour that can wait.... Oh! I feel something sick and weak in me somewhere.’
‘It’s but those knavish old animal spirits playing tricks on the will, but I think that it is only because one is young,’ and he would have launched out on a philosophical dissertation, only Madeleine felt that she could not stand it.
‘Don’t, Jacques!’ she screamed. ‘Talk about me, or I shall go mad!’