Page:A Virgin Heart.pdf/185

Rh know by instinct all that we claim to teach them."

"That's just what innocence is."

"Perhaps. But a delicate voluptuary with an innocent and amorous girl is a lost man."

"I begin to realize the fact."

"There are not," Bouret went on, "several kinds of love. There is only one kind. Love is physical. The most ethereal reverberates through the organism with as much certainty as the most brutal. Nature knows only one end, procreation, and if the road you take does not lead there, she stops you and condemns you at least to some simulacrum; that is her vengeance. Every intersexual sentiment tends towards love, unless its initial character be well defined or unless the partners are in a phase of life in which love is impossible... But I am treating you too much as a friend and too little as a patient. You seem to be pensive. You're not as much interested in questions as Leonor Varin. He is my pupil, in the physiology of morals. How is Lanfranc? He doesn't Platonise, doesn't ﬂirt..."

"Oh! no."

"Varin interests me. Do you know him?"