Then she thought:

"It is true, too, that he needs nobody, not even me. His thoughts alone
are a magnificent world in which he could easily live by himself. But I
can not live without him. What would become of me if I did not have
him?"

She was not alarmed by the violent passion that he had for her. She
recalled that she had said to him one day: "Your love for me is only
sensual. I do not complain of it; it is perhaps the only true love."
And he had replied: "It is also the only grand and strong love. It has
its measure and its weapons. It is full of meaning and of images. It is
violent and mysterious. It attaches itself to the flesh and to the soul
of the flesh. The rest is only illusion and untruth." She was almost
tranquil in her joy. Suspicions and anxieties had fled like the mists of
a summer storm. The worst weather of their love had come when they had
been separated from each other. One should never leave the one whom one
loves.

At the corner of the Avenue Marceau and of the Rue Galilee, she divined
rather than recognized a shadow that had passed by her, a forgotten form.
She thought, she wished to think, she was mistaken. The one whom she
thought she had seen existed no longer, never had existed. It was a
spectre seen in the limbo of another world, in the darkness of a half
light. And she continued to walk, retaining of this ill-defined meeting
an impression of coldness, of vague embarrassment, and of pain in the
heart.

As she proceeded along the avenue she saw coming toward her newspaper
carriers holding the evening sheets announcing the new Cabinet. She