It seemed to him that his love was rendered abject in promiscuity with the banal adventures in this head, which nevertheless was charming and delicate under this fawn-colored hair.
"So these are the things she loves!"
"Are you annoyed?" she asked.
"Yes," Hubert answered frankly, and to get a reassuring answer, "it is because I see you taking pleasure in unworthy books."
"But I swear to you that this book is agreeable and most exciting. It pleases me, as you say, and indeed! it would be very painful to me had I mislaid the other books. I thought I had, at first: thank Heaven, the anguish was brief. Here they are," she added, searching among the cushions, "and I am sorry that there are only three of them and that I shall be obliged, after finishing them, to commence some other story again. Oh! for this sort of distraction, the quality of literature is quite indifferent to me: all I ask is that it be complicated, threatening, as absurd as impossible. It is my opium, or, if you wish, my supply of cigars. In what would you really have me interested, in your analytical things and ... what? symbolical things?"
"But yesterday?" hazarded Hubert.
"Yesterday, the esthetic emotion was presentable. It harmonized with the nuance of my robe and the form of my bodice, to which, moreover, you paid no attention."
"I beg your pardon! the shade was light green and the form was that of Brittany. You looked like a severe lady of yore confining in a rigid corselet breasts that have been mortified by penitence."
"Yes, but you acted as if I were incorporeal and only garbed with the charms of my virtues. I warn you, Monsieur, that on any future occasion when I walk with you (quite improbable occasion!), I will put on the severest black of the severest woolen robe I have."
She continued, after listlessly stirring the embers in the grate.