Page 313 - madame-bovary

And as they were both standing up, he behind her, and
Emma with her head bent, he stooped over her and pressed
long kisses on her neck.
‘You are mad! Ah! you are mad!’ she said, with sounding
little laughs, while the kisses multiplied.
Then bending his head over her shoulder, he seemed to
beg the consent of her eyes. They fell upon him full of an
icy dignity.
Leon stepped back to go out. He stopped on the thresh-
old; then he whispered with a trembling voice, ‘Tomorrow!’
She answered with a nod, and disappeared like a bird
into the next room.
In the evening Emma wrote the clerk an interminable
letter, in which she cancelled the rendezvous; all was over;
they must not, for the sake of their happiness, meet again.
But when the letter was finished, as she did not know Leon’s
address, she was puzzled.
‘I’ll give it to him myself,’ she said; ‘he will come.’
The next morning, at the open window, and humming
on his balcony, Leon himself varnished his pumps with sev-
eral coatings. He put on white trousers, fine socks, a green
coat, emptied all the scent he had into his handkerchief,
then having had his hair curled, he uncurled it again, in or-
der to give it a more natural elegance.
‘It is still too early,’ he thought, looking at the hairdress-
er’s cuckoo-clock, that pointed to the hour of nine. He read
an old fashion journal, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up
three streets, thought it was time, and went slowly towards
the porch of Notre Dame.

1 Madame Bovary