look at her, I don't deny it."

"So I am in love with her, but in a queer fashion. I have the
strongest desire for her, and yet the idea of making her my wife
would seem to me a folly, a piece of stupidity, a monstrous thing:
And I have a little fear of her, as well, the fear which a bird
feels over which a hawk is hovering."

"And again I am jealous of her, jealous of all of which I am
ignorant in her incomprehensible heart. I am always wondering: 'Is
she a charming youngster or a wretched jade?' She says things that
would make an army shudder; but so does a parrot. She is at times so
indiscreet and yet modest that I am forced to believe in her
spotless purity, and again so incredibly artless that I must suspect
that she has never been chaste. She allures me, excites me, like a
woman of a certain category, and at the same time acts like an
impeccable virgin. She seems to love me and yet makes fun of me; she
deports herself in public as if she were my mistress and treats me
in private as if I were her brother or footman."

"There are times when I fancy that she has as many lovers as her
mother. And at other times I imagine that she suspects absolutely
nothing of that sort of life, you understand. Furthermore, she is a
great novel reader. I am at present, while awaiting something
better, her book purveyor. She calls me her 'librarian.' Every week
the New Book Store sends her, on my orders, everything new that has
appeared, and I believe that she reads everything at random. It must
make a strange sort of mixture in her head."

"That kind of literary hasty-pudding accounts perhaps for some of