He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young woman's clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that nimbly eluded his grasp. The movement of his hands suggested the embrace that his feelings prompted.
Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for the future:
"Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?"
Lissac smiled.
"Come," she said, "nonsense! That is a romance whose pages you have already often turned over."
"The romance of my life," whispered Lissac in Marianne's ear.
"The more reason that it should not be read again. It is true there are books one never reads but once. And for that reason, probably, one never forgets them."
She rose abruptly, threw the stump of her cigarette into the fire and looked with a bright, penetrating glance, into Lissac's surprised eyes.
"Ah! it is a long while, you see, since you spoke laughingly—we have both heartily laughed at it—of the 'caprices of Marianne.' Do you know what I am, my dear Guy? Yes, where is the mad creature who was formerly your mistress? Abandoned to dark, profound and incurable ennui, I yawn my life away, as some one said, I yawn it away even to the point of dislocating my jaw. The days seem dull to me, people stupid, books insipid, while fools seem idiots and witty people fools. It is to have the blues, if you will, or rather to have the grays, to hate colorless objects, to be weary of the commonplace, to thirst for the impossible. A thirst that cannot be allayed, let me add. The pure, fresh spring that should slake my thirst has not yet gushed."
She talked in a dry, bitter tone, with a smile that frequently gave way to slight outbreaks of convulsive laughter almost as if she were attacked with a fit of coughing. From time to time, she blew away a cloud of smoke that escaped from her lips, for she had resumed her cigarette, or with the tip of her nail struck her papelito, knocking the ashes on the carpet.