Chapter 2

It had already grown hot. They sat down in the shade, on a tree trunk. Large harmless ants crawled hither and thither on the bark, but M. Hervart seemed to have lost his interest in entomology. Idly, they looked at the busy little creatures, crossing and recrossing one another’s paths.

“Do they know what they’re doing? And do I know what I’m doing? Some sensation guides them. What about me? They run here and there, because they think they’ve seen or smelt some prey. And I? Oh, I should like to run away from my prey. I reason, I deliberate ... Yes, I deliberate, or at least I try.”

He looked up at the girl.

Rose was engaged in pulling foxglove buds off their stems and making them pop in the palm of her hand. Her face was serious. M. Hervart could look at her without distracting her from her dreams.

She made a pretty picture, as she sat there, gentle and, at the same time, wild. Her features, while they still preserved a trace of childishness, were growing marked and definite. She was a woman. How red her mouth was, how voluptuous! M. Hervart caught himself reflecting that that mouth would give most excellent kisses. What a fruit to bite, firm-fleshed and succulent! Rose heaved a sigh, and it was as though a wave had lifted her white dress; all her young bosom had seemed to expand. M. Hervart had a vision of roseate whiteness, soft and living; he desired it as a child desires the peach he sees on the wall hidden under its long leaves. He took the pleasure in this desire that he had sometimes taken in standing before Titian’s Portrait of a Young Lady. The obstacle was as insurmountable: Rose, so far as he was concerned, was an illusion.

“But that makes no difference,” he said to himself, “I have desired her, which isn’t chaste of me. If I had been in love with her, I should not have had that kind of vision. Therefore I am not in love with her. Fortunately!”

Rose was thinking of nothing. She was just letting herself be looked at. Having been examined, she smiled gently, a smile that was faintly tinged with shyness. Flying suddenly to the opposite extreme, she burst out laughing and, holding on with both hands to the knotted trunk, leaned backwards. Her hat fell off her hair came undone. She sat up again, looking wilder than ever. M. Hervart thought that she was going to run away, like Galatea; but there was no willow tree.

“I don’t care,” she said as M. Hervart handed her the hat; “my hair will have to stay down. It’s all right like that. Pins don’t hold on my head.”

“Pins,” said M. Hervart, “pins rarely do hold on women’s heads.”