“You will not think me tiresome?”
“Not at all. You were telling me of yourself. You were speaking of your love of exercise....”
“Ah, yes!... Can you understand that there are in me two distinct individuals?”
“Two distinct....”
“Yes. My soul, which I regard as my real self; and then ... there remains the other.”
“And what is that other?”
“Something ugly, something common, something grossly primitive. In one word, the brute.”
She shrugged her shoulders lightly:
“How dark you paint yourself. The same thing is more or less true of everybody.”
“Yes, but it troubles me more than I can tell you. I suffer; that brute within me hurts my soul, hurts it even more than the whole world hurts it. Now do you know why I feel such a sense of security when I am with you? It is because I do not feel the brute that is in me.... Let me go on a little longer, let me confess; it does me good to tell you all this. You thought I had only seen you four times? But I used to see you so often formerly, in the theatre, in the street, everywhere. It was always rather strange to me when I saw you in the midst of accidental surroundings. And always, when I looked at you, I felt as if I were being lifted to something more beautiful. I cannot express myself more clearly. There is something in your face, in your eyes, in your movements, I don’t know what, but something better than in other people, something that addressed itself, most eloquently, to my soul only. All this is so subtle and so strange; I can hardly put it more plainly. But you are no doubt once more thinking that I am going too far, are you not? Or that I am raving?”