"Very keen, no, but really the desires one evokes murmur in the ears like a flight of vernal butterflies and the rustling of their wings is sometimes soothing to the skin. You cannot understand, it is too feminine."
"Yes," murmured Hubert with a tender but undeniable irony. "Woman is a religion full of mysteries. I wish merely to adore without understanding, to kneel in the gloom, my eyes unraised towards the symbolic little red lamp: joyous mysteries and sad mysteries, to contemplate them alternatively, to know them never, perhaps, in their secret essence, and to love the dear creature whose emanation they are."
She raised her saddened eyes towards him, then, with a little anger:
"Poet and lying poetry! Tenderness is on your lips and not in your heart. Do you remember our first meeting, under the drooping branches of the old sacred firs, down there, in the gloomy avenue? You declared that nothing exists except through an evoking will. I remember it, and since then your words, often meditated, have acquired a terrible and clear meaning. You love a dream creature which you have incarnated under a semblance which is mine; you do not love me as I am, but as you have made me. You do not love a woman, but a heroine of a romance, and everything for you is but a romance.... I will tell you about this at greater length some other time, if I have leisure. Ah! my friend, there often is much charm in you, ah! if you wished and if you knew!... Do something to make me love you sufficiently to resign myself to be loved as the moving shadow of a dream. Do this ... but what do I know? To-morrow, I shall perhaps give you merely a brief no. Perhaps it will be too late to-morrow. Trust no woman, even the sincerest. Their flight is as capricious as the flight of a swallow; this one flies, that one.... They go whither their caprice takes them and then ... and then they follow the sun and kisses are fascinating beams.... Do you find that I seem to be giving you a course in seduction, according to my practice. Ah! perhaps it would be better were you contented with the dream. You could shape it according to your desire, while I, for example, will I not be malleable in vain, if I revolt against your candor? Good-by, the countess has beckoned to me and you know that I am her right hand on all grand occasions.... Good-by, Hubert, oh! we shall doubtless meet once or twice in the course of the evening.... Why not? We have so many things to say to each other.... Give me your arm."
"Strange creature, yet you belong to me! Inextricable problem, I shall decipher you by force of love, for love is the golden key which opens all women's hearts. You have the evangelical good will, you wish to love, you will love, and whom could you love except me? I shall have the curiosity to admit all your phantasies, even those which make me suffer; I do not dislike torture: this helps one to reflect on the inconveniences of being a man."
"Are you enjoying yourself?"
It was Calixte, satisfied to exhale his ennui with this simple interrogation.
"I am not bored, first, for secret reasons, then, there are some pretty dresses. It would be pleasant perhaps to imagine the nude; it is quite another matter to contemplate it: not one woman in ten gives the slighest desire to see more of her. One can be diverted for an hour or two in phonographing some fragments of the conversations in one's memory. But it is too early; this becomes somewhat eccentric only around two o'clock in the morning.
"And also," said Calixte, "to trouble some naive hearts with burning avowals."
"Ah!" answered Hubert, "are you become a dilettante? Yes, this is quite a sadistic pleasure...."