Guy sought to evoke from the well-set, gracefully reclining form, from the half-sly and half-concealed glance, from the palpitating nostrils, something that reminded him of his former ecstasies. Again he saw, shadowed by the chin, that part of her neck where he loved to bury his brow and to rest his lips, greedily, lingeringly, as when one sips a liqueur. A strange emotion seized him. All that had not yet been gratified of his shattered, but not wholly destroyed love, surged within him.
Were it fancy or reminiscence, beside this woman he still felt as of old, a feeling that oppressed his heart and caused him that delightful sensation of uneasiness to which he had been a stranger in connection with his many later easy love adventures. A light, penetrating and sweet odor floated around Marianne, reminding Lissac of the intoxicating perfume of vanished days, an irritating odor as of new-mown hay.
He said nothing, while she awaited his remarks with curiosity. Guy's mute interrogation possibly embarrassed her, for she suddenly shook her head and rose to her feet.
"May one smoke here?" she said, as she opened a Russia leather cigarette-case bearing her monogram.
"What next?" said Guy, lighting a sponge steeped in alcohol that stood in a silver holder and offering it to Marianne.
She quickly closed her fine teeth on the end of the paper cigarette that she had rolled between her fingers and lighted it at the flame. The gleam of the alcohol brightened her eyes and slightly flushed her pale cheeks, which Guy regarded with strange feelings.
"Your invention is an odd one!" she said, as she returned him the little sponge upon which a tongue of blue flame played.
He extinguished it, and abandoning himself to the disturbing charm of reminiscences, watched Marianne who was already half-enveloped in a light cloud of smoke.
"There is one thing you do not know," he said. "More than once—on my honor—at the corner of the street, at some chance meeting, my old Parisian heart has beaten wildly on seeing in some coquettish outline, or in some fair hair falling loosely over an otter-skin cloak, or in some fair, vanishing profile with a pearl set in the lobe of the ear, something that resembled you. Those fur toques with little feathers that everybody wears now, you wore before any one else, on your fair head. Whenever I see one, I follow it. On my word, though, not for her. The fair unknown trotted before me, making the sidewalks echo to the touch of the high heels of her little shoes, while I continued to follow her under the sweet illusion that she would lead me at the end of the journey to a spot where it seemed to me a little of paradise had been scattered. It is thus that phantoms of loved ones course through the streets of Paris in broad daylight, and I am not the only one, Marianne, who has felt the anguish and heart-fluttering that I have experienced. Often have I found my eyes moist after such an experience; but if it were winter, I attributed my tears simply to a cold. Tell me, Marianne, was it really the cold that moistened my eyes?"
Marianne laughed.
"Come, but you are idyllic, my dear Guy," said she, looking at Lissac.
"Melancholy, nothing more."
"Let us say elegiac. Those little fits have come upon you rather late in the day, have they not? A little valerian and quinine, made up into silver-coated pills, is a sovereign remedy."
"You are making fun of me."
"No," she said. "But it was so easy then, seeing that the recollection of me could inspire you with so many poetic ideas and cause you to trot along for such a distance behind plumed toques—it was so easy not to take the train for Milan and not to fly away from me as one skips from a creditor."
Guy could not refrain from smiling.
"Ah! it is because—I loved you too dearly!"
"I know that!" exclaimed Marianne with a tone, in contrast with her elegance, of an artist's model giving a pupil a retort. "A madrigal that has not answered, no; does it rain?"
"I have perhaps been stupid, how can it be helped?" said Lissac.
"Do not doubt it, my dear friend. It is always stupid to deprive one's self of the woman who adores one. Such rarities are not common."
"You remember, dear Marianne," said Guy, "the day when you boldly wrote upon the photographs to some one who loved you dearly: 'To him I love more than every one else in the world?'"
"Yes," said Marianne, blowing a cloud of smoke upward. "Such things as that are never forgotten when one writes them with the least sincerity."
"And you were sincere?"
"On the faith of an honest man," she answered laughingly.
"And yet I have been assured since that time, that you adored another before that one."
"It is possible," said Marianne with sudden bitterness; "but, in the life that I have led, I have been so often purchased that I have been more than once able to mistake for love the pleasure that I have derived."
In those words, uttered sharply, and in a hissing tone like the stroke of a whip-lash in the air, she had expressed so much suffering and hidden anger that Lissac was strangely affected.
Guy, the Parisian, experienced a sentiment altogether curious and unexpected, and this woman whose bare neck was resting on the back of the armchair, allowing the smoke that issued from her lips in puffs to enter her quivering nostrils, seemed to him a new creature, a stranger who had come there to tempt him. In her languishing and, as it were, abandoned pose, he followed the outline of her graceful body, blooming in its youth, the fulness of her bust, the lines of her skirt closely clinging to her exquisite hips, and the unlooked-for return of the lost mistress, the forgotten one, assumed in his eyes the relish of a caprice and an adventure. And then, that bitter remark, spoken in the course of their light Parisian gossip, whetted his curiosity still further and awoke, perhaps, all the latent force of a passion formerly suddenly severed.
He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young woman's clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that nimbly eluded his grasp. The movement of his hands suggested the embrace that his feelings prompted.
Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for the future:
"Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?"
Lissac smiled.
"Come," she said, "nonsense! That is a romance whose pages you have already often turned over."
"The romance of my life," whispered Lissac in Marianne's ear.
"The more reason that it should not be read again. It is true there are books one never reads but once. And for that reason, probably, one never forgets them."
She rose abruptly, threw the stump of her cigarette into the fire and looked with a bright, penetrating glance, into Lissac's surprised eyes.
"Ah! it is a long while, you see, since you spoke laughingly—we have both heartily laughed at it—of the 'caprices of Marianne.' Do you know what I am, my dear Guy? Yes, where is the mad creature who was formerly your mistress? Abandoned to dark, profound and incurable ennui, I yawn my life away, as some one said, I yawn it away even to the point of dislocating my jaw. The days seem dull to me, people stupid, books insipid, while fools seem idiots and witty people fools. It is to have the blues, if you will, or rather to have the grays, to hate colorless objects, to be weary of the commonplace, to thirst for the impossible. A thirst that cannot be allayed, let me add. The pure, fresh spring that should slake my thirst has not yet gushed."
She talked in a dry, bitter tone, with a smile that frequently gave way to slight outbreaks of convulsive laughter almost as if she were attacked with a fit of coughing. From time to time, she blew away a cloud of smoke that escaped from her