really knows love until he has gone through it. And its harmony is so
delicate during the first years of married life that often the very
smallest change in either husband or wife is enough to destroy their
whole relationship. How much more perilous, then, is a sudden change of
fortune or of circumstance! They must needs be very strong--or very
indifferent to each other--to withstand it.

Jacqueline and Olivier were neither indifferent nor strong. They began
to see each other in a new light: and the face of the beloved became
strange to them. When first they made the sad discovery, they hid it
from each other in loving pity: for they still loved each other. Olivier
took refuge in his work, and by applying himself to it regularly, though
with even less conviction than before, won through to tranquillity.
Jacqueline had nothing. She did nothing. She would stay in bed for
hours, or dawdle over her toilette, sitting idly, half dressed,
motionless, lost in thought: and gradually a dumb misery crept over her
like an icy mist. She could not break away from the fixed idea of
love.... Love! Of things human the most Divine when it is the gift of
self, a passionate and blind sacrifice. But when it is no more than the
pursuit of happiness, it is the most senseless and the most elusive....
It was impossible for her to conceive any other aim in life. In moments
of benevolence she had tried to take an interest in the sorrows of other
people: but she could not do it. The sufferings of others filled her
with an ungovernable feeling of repulsion: her nerves were not strong
enough to bear them. To appease her conscience she had occasionally done
something which looked like philanthropy: but the result had been tame
and disappointing.

"You see," she would say to Christophe, "when one tries to do good one
does harm. It is much better not to try. I'm not cut out for it."