anything much: it was the best sort of preventive to keep them from ever
having any deep feeling. On the other hand, it became a sort of chronic
illness with them: they were the first to laugh at it, but they used
lovingly to cultivate it. They excited each other. Simone was more
romantic and more cautious, and used to invent wilder stories. But
Jacqueline, being more sincere and more ardent, came nearer to realizing
them. She was twenty times on the brink of the most hopeless
folly.--However, she did not commit herself, as is the way with young
people. There are times when these poor little crazy creatures--(such as
we have all been)--are within an ace, some of suicide, others of
flinging themselves into the arms of the first man who comes along.
Only, thank God, almost all of them stop short at that. Jacqueline wrote
countless rough drafts of passionate letters to men whom she hardly knew
by sight: but she never sent any of them, except one enthusiastic
letter, unsigned, to an ugly, vulgar, selfish critic, who was as
cold-hearted as he was narrow-minded. She fell in love with him over a
few lines in which she had discovered a rare wealth of sensibility. She
was fired also by a great actor, who lived near her: whenever she passed
his door she used to say to herself:

"Shall I go in?"
And once she made so bold as to go up to the door of his flat. When she
found herself there, she turned and fled. What could she have talked to
him about? She had nothing, nothing at all to say to him. She did not
love him. And she knew it. In the greater part of her folly she was
deceiving herself. And for the rest it was the old, old, delicious,
stupid need of being in love. As Jacqueline was naturally intelligent,
she knew that quite well, and it kept her from making a fool of herself.
A fool who knows his folly is worth two who don't.