"You see, Monsieur Georges," I said to him, with all the gentleness of a maternal reproach, "you are wilfully making yourself sick. You will listen to nothing. And all will have to be begun over again. Great progress we shall make in this way! Be good, I beg of you! And, if you were very nice, do you know what you would do? You would go to bed directly."
He withdrew his hand, stretched out on the long chair, and, as I replaced beneath his head the cushions that had slipped down, he sadly sighed:
"After all, you are right; I ask your pardon."
"You have not to ask my pardon, Monsieur Georges; you have to be quiet."
"Yes, yes," he exclaimed, his eyes fixed on the spot in the ceiling where the lamp made a circle of moving light. "I was a little mad ... to have dreamed for a moment that you could love me,—me who have never had love,—me who have never had anything but suffering. Why should you love me? It would cure me to love you. Since you have been here beside me, and since the beginning of my desire for you; since you have been here with your youth, and your freshness, and your eyes, and your hands,—your little silky hands, whose attentions are the gentlest of caresses; since the time I began to dream of you alone,—I have felt boiling within me, in my soul and in my body, new vigor, a wholly unknown life. That is to say, I did feel that,—for now ... In short, what do you expect? I was mad! And you, you are right."
I was greatly embarrassed. I knew not what to say; I knew not what to do. Powerful and opposite feelings pulled me in all directions. An impulse rushed me toward him, a sacred duty held me back. And in a silly fashion, because I was not sincere, because I could not be sincere in a struggle where these desires and this duty combatted with equal force, I stammered:
"Monsieur Georges, be good. Do not think of these ugly things. It makes you sick. Come, Monsieur Georges, be very nice."
But he repeated:
"Why should you love me? Truly, you are right in not loving me. You think me ill. You fear to poison your mouth with the poisons of mine; you are afraid of contracting my disease—the disease of which I am dying, am I not?—from one of my kisses. You are right."
The cruel injustice of these words struck me to the heart.