Coquerette, her large blue eyes wide opened, had followed with amazement the phases of the terrifying vision. She knew Sidoine's history and understood that a stroke of love madness had touched her friend at the-very hour of the poignant anniversary.
The little frivolous and laughing woman felt a strange thrill. She rose palpitating, threw herself upon Sidoine, as a lioness on her prey, and bit him on the cheek.
"Ah! you are mine, mine only, mine," cried Coquerette kissing, bewildered, the impression of her teeth, "I have marked you with my sign, you belong to me. I love you, Sidoine, I love you even to death. Ah! I have never felt anything like it!"
She lifted him up, made him sit down, placed herself at his feet.
"She is dead," said Sidoine, still giddy, but recovered, "she is dead, but I will love her eternally."
"L'épouvantable misère de ceux qui vivent sans amour." Rusbrock l'Admirable, _De la Jouissance chaste_.
"Do you know, Madame, that Monsieur Moscowitch has the firm intention of marrying you?"
"Then," asked Entragues, "why did you not let me know?"
"Ah! you would like to have the cards stacked. You do not wish to waste your time? At first, not any more than yourself, Monsieur Moscowitch never asked more than the pleasure of seeing me."
"Isn't he?" returned Sixtine. "He pleases me very much and I believe that with him I shall never be bored."
"Ah! you are quite perverse, but perhaps that is why I love you."
"Perverse, because I do not wish to be bored!"
"No, boredom is the terror of every woman, and they commit half of their crimes to escape its claws. But it is useless. Boredom, impassive, smokes his houka and maintains his slaves. I well know that passion is stronger than he is, but you are incapable of loving."
"No more than another," Sixtine nonchalantly said, "and, besides all I ask is to be given the chance. I have already told you I was dough waiting for the hands of the kneader; and, after all I can not fashion myself alone. But are you coming to warble such poor ditties of jealousy, and in such a vulgar style. I believed you had more disdain and a richer vocabulary. Ah, fie! to sing such a romanza to me: 'You are incapable of loving.' Well, Monsieur, to use your language, I am at least capable of being loved. You seem to think that in love there is a category of capacities as in the time of Louis-Philippe? Would it be a special string that the cithara lacks? All the human instruments are complete and even women have spare strings, if you care to know. But skillful citharists are rare and most men only know how to direct the preliminary chord of the instrument from which they pretend to draw music. Please speak to me in the language of a logician, since that is your intellectual profession, and do not imagine that I am a boarding-school girl who will feel herself burning with love, through a very noble spirit of contradiction, at the very moment when a man presents her adroit inaninity: 'You are incapable of loving.' For you are perhaps very skillful and capable, oh! very capable of demonstrating the patent lack of logic in my feminine deductions. But, question me!"