. . Yes indeed. One gets sick of it.”

As the young woman did not answer, he continued, hoping to shock her with blatant sacrilege. “I’d like to be loved by a nun, you know. Now that might be amusing. . . . Have you ever dreamed of loving a man you couldn’t think about without committing a crime?”

She remained somber, however, and Maxime, seeing that she stayed silent, concluded that she wasn’t listening. With the back of her neck resting on the padded sill of the carriage, she seemed to be asleep with her eyes wide open. She lay inert, in the grip of her dreams, while now and then her lips twitched nervously. The shadow of twilight softly invaded her. All that that shadow contained of vague sadness, of discreet pleasure, of unavowed hope, penetrated her, bathing her in a sort of languid and morbid atmosphere. While staring at the round back of the footman perched on his bench, she was no doubt thinking about her pleasures of the past, of the parties she now found so dreary and no longer cared for. She looked back on her former life: the immediate gratification of her appetites, the loathsome luxury, and the oppressive monotony of the same caresses and the same betrayals repeated time and time again. Then there dawned in her something like a ray of hope, along with shudders of desire: the idea of that “something else” that her feverish mind had failed to discover. At this point her reverie went awry. Despite her efforts, the word she was looking for eluded her in the gathering darkness, was swallowed up by the steady rumble of the carriages. The soft swaying of the calèche was yet another obstacle that prevented her from formulating what it was she wanted. A tremendous temptation welled up from all that emptiness, from the shrubbery slumbering in the darkness on either side of the path, from the sound of the wheels and the gentle rocking of the carriage, which filled her with a delicious drowsiness. A thousand tiny breaths blew across her flesh: unfinished dreams, unnamed pleasures, vague wants—all the exquisite and monstrous things that a drive home from the Bois at the hour when the sky turns pale can put into a woman’s weary heart. She kept her two hands buried in the bearskin and felt very warm in her white cloth jacket with its mauve velvet lining. As she stretched her leg, relaxing in snug comfort, her ankle brushed the warmth of Maxime’s leg. He took no particular notice of this touch. A jolt wrenched her from her half-sleep. Lifting her head, she turned her gray eyes on the young man sprawled in all his elegance and stared at him oddly.

At that moment the calèche left the Bois. The avenue de l’Impératrice stretched straight ahead into the dusk, lined on both sides by green-painted wooden fences converging to a point on the horizon. On the side path reserved for riders, a white horse in the distance pierced a bright hole in the gray shadow. Scattered along the path on the other side of the avenue, tardy strollers formed groups of black dots slowly moving in the direction of Paris.