"No matter, the premise of my logic was false, for the conclusion is absurd.
"We live in imaginary realms, that is to say in the transcendental or supernatural reality; then why not place both feet on the same plane? To dream of love, must I have pressed against my flesh the flesh of my beloved? Naïveté. Did Guido touch his madonna? It she a woman he has possessed—or only played with? For its is a true pleasure of love to reinvolve its illusory carnality in order to love, in the person of the woman, the intangible creature of one's dreams!
"I reason well, decidedly. I am a logician.
"I should have followed this career.... Ah! here is the house! Already? The same exclamation as yesterday evening! I do not get bored with myself. No, and here I am returned to the place I left."
Entragues shrugged his shoulders, thinking: "One would say that above is someone who is stronger and who mocks at us."
Then, he rang.
She was tired, pale despite the red of her robe, reclining in a large arm-chair, barricaded with cushions, very near a big wood fire; she was reading, her head thrown back.
The light, feeble and bluish, fell from a suspended lamp. Hubert suspected that she could not decipher the printed pages and thought she had assumed an attitude, but he was mistaken: Sixtine, like many women, had the eyes of a cat; she was very seriously reading les Victimes d'Amour.
Seeing this title on the rose-colored cover of the volume which Sixtine had thrown on the ground at his approach, Hubert had a moment of anguish.
"I misunderstood the woman!"