his button-hole. Nothing could have been more disgustingly
fantastic. And he would also say to Renouard: "You may yet change
the history of our country. For economic conditions do shape the
history of nations. Eh? What?" And he would turn to Miss Moorsom
for approval, lowering protectingly his spatulous nose and looking
up with feeling from under his absurd eyebrows, which grew thin, in
the manner of canebrakes, out of his spongy skin. For this large,
bilious creature was an economist and a sentimentalist, facile to
tears, and a member of the Cobden Club.

In order to see as little of him as possible Renouard began coming
earlier so as to get away before his arrival, without curtailing
too much the hours of secret contemplation for which he lived. He
had given up trying to deceive himself. His resignation was
without bounds. He accepted the immense misfortune of being in
love with a woman who was in search of another man only to throw
herself into his arms. With such desperate precision he defined in
his thoughts the situation, the consciousness of which traversed
like a sharp arrow the sudden silences of general conversation.
The only thought before which he quailed was the thought that this
could not last; that it must come to an end. He feared it
instinctively as a sick man may fear death. For it seemed to him
that it must be the death of him followed by a lightless,
bottomless pit. But his resignation was not spared the torments of
jealousy: the cruel, insensate, poignant, and imbecile jealousy,
when it seems that a woman betrays us simply by this that she
exists, that she breathes--and when the deep movements of her
nerves or her soul become a matter of distracting suspicion, of
killing doubt, of mortal anxiety.