"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."
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.
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.
"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?"