"You evade my question."
"If you begin like that, I warn you I will not listen. Besides, I am neglecting my cockades."
She unslung her basket and again accosted the crowd. Barabant, after the first outburst of expostulation, waited moodily, leaning against a tree, his gaze lost in the current. The moment Nicole was assured of his abstraction, she hesitated no longer, but slipping through the throng, quickly gained her liberty among distant streets.
She knew that the evasion was unwise, exposing her to his judgment either as a coquette or as fearing to betray her true feelings—opinions which she did not wish him to entertain. She had fled, but not by calculation. She had again avoided him, and yet she scarcely understood why. New emotions had awakened in her a commotion that disturbed her whole theory of life.
Before, with happy tolerance, she had passed along the weary road of poverty, shrugging her shoulders at hunger, meeting adversity with a smile, expecting two or three attachments, not deep; delightful while lasting, sharp and saddening when broken; but, sad or sweet, not to be regarded too seriously,—the lot of life.
She had, therefore, welcomed the coming of Barabant with the pleasurable anticipation of a delightful comradeship. That she could retain him, or, in all probability, would care to retain him, beyond a certain term never occurred to her. As to the question of marriage, it did not for a moment enter her head. For her it did not exist.
A sigh drawn from her soul as she stood by his bed had dissipated all that, and discovered to her immense longings, womanly, motherly necessities which she had never realized before and which she imperfectly comprehended now. She perceived him no longer as a comrade, but as the new need of her awakened nature.
She had imagined love as impassioned, headlong, and impetuous, and, in the place of this ideal, she felt only the confident, weak appeal of Barabant to her ministering tenderness. The sensation was acute, poignant, disturbing; the happiness that had possessed her then was too big, too strange; it frightened her. She feared such a transforming, all-consuming love. To give herself utterly thus she felt, in her intuitions, would mean only disaster. So she fled from herself, trying to stifle that immense emotion to which she had no right,—so fraught with peril. So when, through all the rumble of sound and the ceaseless rabble of the boulevards, there returned the silent room under the eaves, and the feverish smile that answered to her soothing touch, she incessantly cried to herself:
"No, no. I would love him too much. The end would crush me."