Yes, she's clever, open-minded, popular, and--well, charming.

But you don't know what it is to have moved, breathed, existed, and even triumphed in the mere smother and froth of life--the brilliant froth.

There thoughts, sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions too, are nothing but agitation in empty space--to amuse life--a sort of superior debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning nothing, leading nowhere.

She is the creature of that circle.

And I ask myself if she is obeying the uneasiness of an instinct seeking its satisfaction, or is it a revulsion of feeling, or is she merely deceiving her own heart by this dangerous trifling with romantic images.