Each
took a room in another part of the town, but under the same pseudonym.
Our common lodging was first deserted, then formally given up by each.
Always what one did, that did the other, though no longer intending to
act in consort with him. He could not help it though he tried, for the
other tried also, and did the same thing. One of us might for months have
played the part of both without detection--especially if it had been
understood that we had parted company; but I think it was never
suspected, although now we were rarely for a moment together, and still
more rarely spoke. A few weeks sufficed to bring us to the verge of
madness.
"To this day I doubt if the woman, our common disease, knew the one of us
from the other. That in any part of her being there was the least
approach to a genuine womanly interest in either of us, I do not believe.
I am very sure she never cared for me. Preference I cannot think
possible; she could not, it seems to me, have felt anything for one of us
without feeling the same for both; I do not see how, with all she knew of
us, we could have made two impressions upon her moral sensorium.
"It was at length the height of summer, and every one sought change of
scene and air. It was time for us to go home; but I wrote to my father,
and got longer leave."
"I wrote too," interposed my uncle Edmund at this point of the story,
when my own uncle was telling it that evening in Paris.
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