As soon as she had gone, he took his hat and overcoat and went out. A cold sun in a misty blue sky cast a pale, rather artificial and melancholy light on the city. After he had walked for a while, his quick, irritated steps jostling startled passersby, for he refused to allow himself to deviate from a straight line, his rage against her began to crumble into irritation and regret. After repeating all the reproaches he had heaped upon her, he recalled, seeing other women pass, how pretty and winning she was. Like so many others who refuse to admit it, he had always awaited the impossible encounter, the rare, unique, poetic, and impassioned affection, the dream of which hovers over all men’s hearts. Had he not almost found it? Might she not have been the one who would have given him that almost impossible happiness? Why is it then that nothing of the kind is ever realized? Why can one never possess what one pursues, or why does one attain only fragments, rendering ever more painful this endless pursuit of illusions?

All the details, skillfully put together, created an irresistibly comic silhouette. You saw the gentleman dressed by his valet, expressing first of all to the hairdresser who had come to shave him a few general ideas, then, taking his morning walk, questioning the grooms about the health of the horses, then rotating through the avenues of the Bois, oppressed with the one task of exchanging salutations, then breakfasting opposite his wife and breaking silence only to enumerate the names of the persons met that morning, continuing till evening from drawing room to drawing room, refreshing his intelligence by contact with his fellows and dining at last with a prince with whom the temperature of the whole of Europe was discussed, to finish the evening in the greenroom at the opera, where his timid pretensions of excess were innocently satisfied by the appearance of very questionable surroundings.

The painter was contemplating, under strong daylight, both mother and daughter, one after the other. Certainly they were different, yet at the same time so alike that one was evidently a continuation of the other—the same blood, the same flesh, animated by the same life. Their eyes, especially those blue eyes flecked with tiny black specks—a fresh blue in the daughter, a little faded in the mother—looked at him with such similarity of expression when he spoke to them that he expected to hear them make the same answers. And he was a little surprised to find, as he made them joke and laugh, that here before him were two very distinct women, one who had lived and one who was beginning to live. No, he couldn’t see what would become of that child when her young mind, influenced by tastes and instincts still dormant, had opened and expanded amid the events of the world. Here was a pretty little new person, ready for chances and for love, ignored and ignoring, who sailed out of port like a new vessel, even as her mother was returning, having traversed existence, having loved!

Her coquetry, always on the alert but always accentuated since she felt on all sides certain hints, as yet almost imperceptible, of the innumerable attacks of age, took a more active form. To become as slender as Annette she continued to drink nothing, and the real slenderness of her waist restored to her indeed the figure of a young girl so far that from behind they could scarcely be distinguished from one another, but her face, grown thin, suffered under this treatment.

The skin, once plumped out, formed wrinkles and assumed a yellowish tint that rendered the superb freshness of the child all the more striking. Then she protected her face by the processes of the stage, and although she thus created for herself a rather suspicious fairness in the strong light of day, she obtained under the gaslight that artificial and charming brilliancy which gives an incomparable complexion to well-painted women.

The realization of this decadence and the employment of these artifices modified her habits. She avoided as much as possible comparisons in broad daylight, and sought them by the light of the lamps, which gave her an advantage. When she felt fatigued, pale, older than usual, she had accommodating headaches, which caused her to forego balls or theaters; but on those days when she felt at her best, she triumphed and played the elder sister with the grave modesty of the young mother. In order that her appearance should be always similar to her daughter’s she gave the girl dresses suitable for a young matron, somewhat grave for her; and Annette, whose playful and vivacious character became more and more conspicuous, wore them with a sparkling sprightliness that rendered her still more pleasing. She lent herself unreservedly to the coquettish maneuvers of her mother, instinctively enacted with her graceful little scenes, knew how to kiss her at the proper time and put her arm lovingly about her waist, showing by a motion, a caress, some ingenious invention, how pretty they both were, and how they resembled each other.

Her life till now had been spent almost without suffering, varied only by Olivier’s affection and agitated only by the desire to retain it. She had succeeded, had been always victorious in that struggle. Her heart, lulled by success and flattery, having become the exacting organ of a lovely worldling to whom are due all the sweets of earth, after consenting to a brilliant marriage with which inclination had nothing to do, after later having accepted love as the complement of a happy existence, after having resigned herself to a guilty affection, mainly from impulse and a little from a worship of sentiment itself, as a compensation for the daily treadmill of existence—her heart had taken up a position, had barricaded itself in the happiness chance had given her, with no other desire than to defend itself against the surprises of each day. She had, therefore, accepted with a pretty woman’s complacence the agreeable conditions that presented themselves, and, venturing but little, tormented but little by new wants and longings for the unknown, though loving, tenacious, and cautious, content with the present, apprehensive by nature of the future, had known how to enjoy the benefits furnished her by Destiny with sparing and sagacious prudence.

Now, little by little, without her daring even to realize it, the indistinct prepossessions of passing days, of advancing years had slipped into her soul. It had, in her mind, the effect of a little ceaseless irritation. But well knowing that this descent of life was without interruption, that once begun it could no longer be stayed, yielding to the instinct of danger, she closed her eyes as she let herself slip along, that she might preserve her dream, that she might not be made giddy by the abyss or desperate by her helplessness.

She lived on, therefore, smiling, with a sort of factitious pride in preserving her beauty so long; and when Annette appeared by her side with the freshness of her eighteen years, instead of suffering from this association, she was proud, on the contrary, of the fact that she should be preferred in the accomplished grace of her maturity to that blooming young girl in the radiant freshness of her early years.

The painter, bareheaded, eyes shining, was breathing deeply, and as he caught the countess’s glance he said, “This is happiness.”

She came nearer. “It never lasts.”

“Let’s take it when it comes.”

“You don’t love me as I love you,” she murmured.

“Oh, why do you say—”

She interrupted him, saying, “No, in me you love, as you put it so well before dinner, a woman who satisfies the wants of your heart, a woman who’s never caused you pain and who’s managed to put a little happiness into your life. That I know, that I feel. Yes, I have the consciousness, the deep joy of having been good and useful and helpful to you. And you’ve loved, you still love, all that you find in me: my solicitude for you, my admiration, my desire to please you, my passion—the complete gift I’ve made to you of myself. But that’s not me you love, don’t you understand that? Oh! I feel that the way you feel a cold draft. In me you love so many things—my beauty, which is fading, my devotion, the wit people say they find in me, the opinion the world has of me, the opinion I have of you in my heart—but that’s not me, that’s nothing of myself. Can’t you understand that?”

Then she was possessed with a sudden, irresistible desire to go away, to leave at once by the first train, to quit the country where one perceived too clearly by the strong light of the fields the indelible traces of sorrow and years. In Paris one lives in the half shadow of apartments, where heavy curtains, even at midday, admit only a mellow light. She would be beautiful again there, with the pallor one needs in that dim, discriminating glimmer. Then Annette’s face passed before her eyes, her hair a little rumpled, when she was playing lawn tennis. She comprehended then the unacknowledged anxiety from which her soul had suffered. She was not jealous of the beauty of her daughter. No, assuredly! But she did feel, she confessed for the first time, that she must never again appear at her side in bright sunlight.

Yet the countess reproached him with being jealous of the marquis. Was it true? He again examined his conscience severely, and ascertained that in truth he was a little jealous. What was astonishing about that, after all? Are we not at every instant jealous of men who pay their court to no matter what woman? Do we not in the street, the restaurant, the theater, feel a sort of enmity against the gentleman who is passing or who enters with a beautiful woman on his arm? Every possessor of a woman is a rival. It is a man who has won, a conqueror, who is envied by the other men. And then, without entering into these physiological considerations, if it was natural that he should have for Annette a sympathy rendered somewhat too active by his love for her mother, was it not therefore natural that he should feel rising within him a little animal hatred of the future husband? He would have no difficulty in overcoming this ignoble person.

“By the way,” she said, “I studied something for you before mother died, but you haven’t heard it yet. I’ll play it when the little one’s finished. I want you to hear how strange it is.”

The countess had real talent, and a subtle comprehension of the emotion that flows through sound. It had always been one of her surest powers over the painter’s sensibility.

As soon as Annette had finished Schumann’s Pastoral Symphony, the countess rose, took her place, and awakened a strange melody through her fingers, a melody of which every phrase seemed a complaint, even manifold complaints, changing, numerous, then interrupted by a single note, continually recurring, dropping into the evident melody, shattering it like an incessant, persecuting cry, the insatiable call of importunity.

But Olivier was looking at Annette, who had just seated herself in front of him, and he heard nothing, understood nothing.