and necessarily a believer in success. But I have been looking too
long at life not to distrust its surprises. Age! Age! Here I
stand before you a man full of doubts and hesitation--spe lentus,
timidus futuri."

He made a sign to Renouard not to interrupt, and in a lowered
voice, as if afraid of being overheard, even there, in the solitude
of the terrace -

"And the worst is that I am not even sure how far this sentimental
pilgrimage is genuine. Yes. I doubt my own child. It's true that
she's a woman. . . . "

Renouard detected with horror a tone of resentment, as if the
professor had never forgiven his daughter for not dying instead of
his son. The latter noticed the young man's stony stare.

"Ah! you don't understand. Yes, she's clever, open-minded,
popular, and--well, charming. But you don't know what it is to
have moved, breathed, existed, and even triumphed in the mere
smother and froth of life--the brilliant froth. There thoughts,
sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions too, are nothing but
agitation in empty space--to amuse life--a sort of superior
debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning nothing, leading
nowhere. She is the creature of that circle. And I ask myself if
she is obeying the uneasiness of an instinct seeking its
satisfaction, or is it a revulsion of feeling, or is she merely
deceiving her own heart by this dangerous trifling with romantic
images. And everything is possible--except sincerity, such as only
stark, struggling humanity can know. No woman can stand that mode