Slowly my agitation receded. Albertine would be home soon. I would hear her ring the door-bell in a moment. I could feel that my life was no longer what it once might have been; and that to have, in this way, a woman with whom, quite naturally, when she came home, I would be expected to go out, to whose embellishment the strength and activity of my being would be increasingly devoted, made me into something like a twig which has grown in length, but is weighed down by the plump fruit in which all its reserves of strength have been concentrated.
