“You’re a boy, Odette.”
“If you like.”
“A boy in a blue beret, a white dress, wooden sandals, blond hair, small fists and violet eyes. Give me your hand and let me shake it, man to man. If you’d been a little uglier, I’d give you a pair of hiking boots, teach you to smoke a pipe and we’d take to the mountains and sleep in huts on hard wooden beds, far away from love, swoons and psychological complications.”
*Renée Rey is sick. The blinds at her windows have not been drawn up all day. She didn’t come down for lunch, and Monsieur Rey, accompanied only by Nicolle, ate his sombrely, yet with a hearty appetite.
“He’s a butcher,” complained one of the ladies from the hotel.
“He’s a simple man,” thought Odette.
In the evening the doctor came, forced by Monsieur Rey into their bedroom despit
