One part of the story, the mountain part, she had grasped at once. He only saw the love in it; she, on the other hand, at once felt the boredom and the cold. She looked at him, saw what answer he expected of her, and just to please him, replied without any enthusiasm: “Oh, it would be glorious!”

But she had already hurt his feelings too much. He had always believed that if ever he should make up his mind to marry her she would accept with enthusiasm whatever conditions he might impose. But no! At such a height as that she would not have been happy, even with him, and dark though it was he could read in her face the amazement she felt at his daring to propose that she should go and spend her youth among the snow in that terribly lonely place; all that made up her beauty too, her hair, her complexion, her teeth, everything she so much enjoyed seeing people admire.

Their roles were now reversed. He had proposed to marry her, though only as a figure of speech, it was true; and she had not accepted him; he was utterly dumbfounded. “Of course,” he said with bitter irony, “there would be no one up there to give you their photographs, and you would not find anyone standing still in the road to stare at you.”

She felt the bitterness of his words, but she was not offended by his irony because she agreed with him and at once began discussing the question. It was so cold up there, she said, and she didn’t like the cold; in winter she always felt miserable even in the town. Besides, you can only live once on the earth, and up there you ran the risk of living a shorter time and of leading a less pleasant life, because you would never get her to believe that it could be very amusing to watch the clouds go by even if it was beneath your feet.

She was right, no doubt, but how cold-hearted and stupid she was! He refused to continue the discussion, for how could he ever hope to convince her? He looked away, trying to find an argument. He might have avenged himself and quieted his nerves by saying something insulting. But he remained silent and irresolute, gazing out into the night, at the lights scattered over the peninsula opposite, at the tower which rose, a motionless, dim blue shadow above the trees at the entrance to the Arsenal, a shape which chance had fashioned and flung upon the air.

“I don’t say I wouldn’t,” Angiolina added, in the hope of pacifying him. “It would be glorious, of course, but...” She stopped suddenly; she reflected that since he was so anxious for her to enthuse about that mountain which they would certainly neither of them ever see, it would be foolish not to humor him: “It would be absolutely lovely,” she repeated the phrase again and again in a crescendo of enthusiasm. But he went on gazing out into the night, without looking at her; he was more hurt than ever by her mock enthusiasm, which was so obviously unreal that it seemed as if she were just laughing at him, especially as she made no effort to draw him to her. “If you want a proof,” she said, “I will go away with you tomorrow, or now this very minute, and live alone with you forever.”

His state of mind was now identical with that of the morning before, and in a flash he thought of Balli. “Balli, the sculptor, wants to make your acquaintance.”

“Really?” she cried gaily. “I should like it so much too,” and she sounded ready to run off on the spot in search of Balli. “I have heard so much about him from a girl who was in love with him that I have wanted to know him for ever so long. Where can he have seen me to make him want to know me?”

It was nothing new for her to show interest in other men before him, but it always gave him a painful sensation. “He didn’t even know of your existence,” he said sharply. “He only knows what I have told him about you.” He had hoped to offend her, but on the contrary she was very grateful to him for having talked about her. “But I wonder now what you have been saying to him about me,” she remarked with a comic note of diffidence in her voice. “I told him that you are a traitor,” he said with a laugh. His words made them both burst out laughing, which at once put them into the best of humors with each other. She let him kiss her again and again, and full of tenderness whispered in his ear: “Je tem bocù.” “Traitor,” he repeated, but this time sadly. She laughed again noisily, but then she discovered something better. With an exquisite gesture which he could never afterwards forget, and in a sweet, imploring voice, richer than her ordinary voice, she put her mouth to his and in the midst of kissing him breathed into his lips the question: “It isn’t true, is it, that I am what you said I was?” So that the end of their evening was delicious too. One movement invented by Angiolina was enough to cancel all his doubts and all his pain.

On the way back he remembered that Balli was going to bring a woman with him too, and he made haste to tell her. She did not seem to mind, but later she asked him with an air of indifference, which was certainly not put on, if Balli was very much in love with this woman. “I don’t think so,” he said in all sincerity, glad to notice that she seemed indifferent. “Balli has an odd way of being in love with women; he loves them very much and all equally, supposing they please him at all.”

“He has had a great many, I suppose?” she inquired thoughtfully.