She was a small woman – a little slip of one, as the general had said – dark-haired and pale, save for a little color in her cheeks, round-faced with a slightly snub nose, thin-lipped, with immense eyelashes and practically no eyebrows, so that, seen in profile, her brown lashes seemed to detach themselves from her face, and one could imagine – for her hair was hidden under her leather headgear – that she was a blonde.

After a few banal phrases, Ellen said:

“My visit is not comme il faut.”

Marcueil, wrapped in his Spanish cloak, could hardly have been said to be dressed to receive a guest. Yet, however bizarre and outlandish his garb, it was rather in keeping with a certain monastic modesty, containing him in its coarse folds from his neck to his ankles. Ellen unaffectedly allowed her gaze to descend to his bare feet in their wooden sandals, extraordinarily small feet like those of the fauns on antique vases. All she could see was the curve of the heel and the big toe; the arch of his sole was lost in his robe like the rising of some Lilliputian vault.

She murmured, like a password to be understood by Marcueil and herself alone: “The Indian so celebrated by Theophrastus. . .” Marcueil, who was not wearing his pince-nez, lowered his gaze suddenly, as though to conceal his soul – or any other inner thing – from the girl.

Ellen calmly continued the unreciprocated dialogue:

“Guess why I believe in the ‘Indian’? Because no one else will. . . thank goodness! Besides, in public I won’t believe in him. . . Don’t be surprised, when we see each other again in some drawing room, to hear me mock more, and more savagely, than any other woman – this Man whose strength knows no bounds. . .”

“How many lovers have you had?” asked Marcueil, with cold simplicity.

Without answering this question, she said:

“So you like numbers? All right: there is one chance out of a thousand that the ‘Indian’ exists, and that one chance justifies my having come. There are a thousand chances to one – and this is important for my reputation – that no one will believe in the Indian’s existence. That makes a total, then, of one thousand and one good reasons for my coming to see you.”

“How many were they?” repeated Marcueil, with some insolence.

“But. . . they weren’t, my dear sir,” said Ellen, with dignity.

“To lie is classically feminine, but vague,” said Marcueil.

“They did not count in the eyes of the world, which never knew of them, nor in my own, for I was merely dreaming! The Absolute Lover must exist, since woman can conceive of him, just as there is but one proof of the immortality of the soul, which is that man, through fear of nothingness, aspires to it!”