She had unconsciously taken refuge, as it were, in the arms of the man who loved her, and Lissac felt the exquisite grace of the body abandoned to him, without the woman's reflecting upon it, without loving him, lost—
It is quite certain that in her nervous, heart-broken condition, Adrienne was not considering whether his affection for her sprung from friendship or from love.
For a moment this master skeptic, Guy, felt that he was committing the greatest folly of his life.
The young woman did not understand; nevertheless, even without love, he clearly felt that this chasteness and grace, all that there was exquisitely seductive about her, belonged to him—if he dared—
"You are feverish, Adrienne," he said, as he took her hands as he would a child's.
"I am choking here!—I wish to leave!—take me away!"
"Nonsense," said Lissac. "What are you thinking about? They are calling for you, yonder."
"It is because they call for me that I wish to escape. Don't you see that I abhor all those people; that I detest them as much as I despise them? Take me away!"
Lissac had become very pale. He tried to smile at Adrienne—the heroic smile of a wounded man undergoing amputation—and he whispered:
"Don't you know very well, madame, that you would not have taken two steps in the street, on my arm, before you would become a lost woman?"