M. Hervart had got up early and had been strolling about the garden for some time past. He had spent half the night in thought. All the women he had loved or known had visited his memory with their customary gestures and the attitudes they affected. There was that other one who seemed always to have come merely to pay a friendly call; it needed real diplomacy to obtain from her what, at the bottom of her heart, she really desired. Between these two extremes there were many gradations. Most of them liked to give themselves little by little, playing their desire against their sense of shame M. Hervart flattered himself that he knew all about women; he knew that who let herself be touched will let herself be wholly possessed.
"A woman," he said to himself, "who has been as familiar as Rose has been, or even much less familiar, ought to be one who has surrendered herself. Perhaps she might make me wait a few days more, but she would belong to me, she would let her eyes confess it and her lips would speak it out. Such a woman would even be disposed to hasten the coming of the delightful moment, if I had not the wit to prepare it myself. Rose, being a young girl and having only the dimmest presentiments of the truth, does not know how to hasten our happiness; otherwise she most certainly would hasten it. She belongs, then, to me. The question to be answered is this: shall I go on smelling the rose on the tree, or shall I pluck it?"
The poetical quality of this metaphor seemed to him perhaps a little flabby. He began to speak to himself, without actually articulating the words, even in a whisper, in more precise terms.
"Well, then, if I take her, I shall keep her. I have never thought of marrying, but it's no good going against the current of one's life. It may be happiness. Shall I lay up this regret for my old age: happiness passed dose to me, smiling to my desire, and my eyes remained dull and my mouth dumb? Happiness? Is it certain? Happiness is always uncertain. Unhappiness too. And the fusing of these two elements makes a dull insipid mixture."
This commonplace idea occupied him for a while. Every joy is transient, and when it has passed one finds oneself numb and neutral once again.