JACQUES DE RANDOL

Because I covet you as the starving covet the food they see behind the
glassy barriers of a restaurant.

MME. DE SALLUS

Oh, Jacques!

JACQUES DE RANDOL

I tell you it is true! A woman of the world belongs to the world; that
is to say, to everyone except the man to whom she gives herself. He can
see her with open doors for a quarter of an hour every three days--not
oftener, because of servants. In exceptional cases, with a thousand
precautions, with a thousand fears, with a thousand subterfuges, she
visits him once or twice a month, perhaps, in a furnished room. Then she
has just a quarter of an hour to give him, because she has just left
Madame X in order to visit Madame Z, where she has told her coachman to
take her. If he complains, she will not come again, because it is
impossible for her to get rid of her coachman. So, you see, the
coachman, and the footman, and Madame Z, and Madame X, and all the
others, who visit her house as they would a museum,--a museum that never
closes,--all the he's and all the she's who eat up her leisure minute by
minute and second by second, to whom she owes her time as an employee
owes his time to the State, simply because she belongs to the world--all
these persons are like the transparent and impassable glass: they keep
you from my love.

MME. DE SALLUS [_dryly_]