"But you have already paid me, sir, at the beginning of the month," said the other.
"I may be away for a long time," said Hubert drawing a bank-note from his pocket-book. "You will put this down to the account."
"You are not coming in, sir?" resumed the doorkeeper.
"No," said Hubert, and he went away, saying to himself, "I am a simpleton. Women of that sort don't kill themselves!"
Women of that sort! The phrase, which had occurred naturally to him, the youth hitherto so ingenuous, so gentle, and so refined, was a fitting translation of the kind of feeling which now held the ascendancy over him, and which lasted for several days. It was a boundless disgust, a thorough nausea; but so complete and so profound was it, that it left no room in his heart for anything else. He could not even have told whether he was suffering, so entirely did contempt absorb all the living energies of his being.
He perceived the woman whom he had idolised so religiously and with so noble a fervour, plunged, as it were, and wallowing in such an abyss of uncleanness, that he felt as though by loving her he had himself been rolling in the mire. This was the physical sight of which he was now the victim from one end of the day to the other, and to such a degree that he was unable to interpret it or form any hypothesis concerning Theresa's character. The sight of it was inflicted upon him with a material exactness which bordered on hallucination. Yes, he could see the act, and the act alone, without having strength enough to shake off the hideous, besetting fellowship. It paralysed him with horror, and he could think of nothing else.
A sort of unbroken mirage showed him the abominable pollution of his mistress's prostitution, and, just as a man attacked by jaundice looks at all objects through bile-infected eyes, so it was, through his disgust, that he viewed, the whole of life. His soul was as though saturated with bitterness, and yet was frightfully dry. There was not an impression that was not transformed in him into this perception of foulness and melancholy.
He rose, and spent the morning among his books, opening but not reading them. He lunched, and the sight of his mother irritated, instead of softening him. He went back to his room, and resumed the dull idleness of the morning. He dined, and then, immediately after dinner, left the drawing-room, so as not to encounter either the General or his cousin, whose presence was intolerable to him.
At night he lay awake, continuing to see the accursed scene with the same impossibility of arriving at relaxation of grief. If he fell asleep, he had every second time to endure the nightmare of this same vision. As he had no conception of the physiognomy of the man with whom his mistress had deceived him, there rose up in his morbid sleep horrible dreams wherein all kinds of different faces were mingled together. The distress which such imagining caused him would awake him. His body would be bathed in sweat, he could feel a rending of the bosom as though his quick-beating heart were about to leave its place, and with this suffering there was, as before, such complete prostration of his affectionate powers, that he was not even anxious to know what had become of Theresa.
"After all," he said to himself one morning as he was getting up, "I lived well enough before I knew her! I have only to put myself again in thought into the condition in which I was before that 12th of October." He had an exact recollection of the date. "It was scarcely more than a year ago; I was so tranquil then! I have had an evil dream, that is all. But I must destroy everything that might bring back the memory of it to me."