“Tomorrow? Yes, if you like, but it will have to be with Bloch. I met him just now on the doorstep; he was rather stiff with me at first because I had quite forgotten to answer his last two letters. (At least, he didn’t tell me that that was what had annoyed him, but I guessed it.) But after that he was so friendly to me that I simply can’t disappoint him. Between ourselves, on his side at least, I can feel it’s a life and death friendship.” Nor do I consider that Robert was altogether mistaken. Furious detraction was often, with Bloch, the effect of a keen affection which he had supposed to be unreturned. And as he had little power of imagining the lives of other people, and never dreamed that one might have been ill, or away from home, or otherwise occupied, a week’s silence was at once interpreted by him as meaning a deliberate coldness. And so I have never believed that his most violent outbursts as a friend, or in later years as a writer, went very deep. They rose to a paroxysm if one replied to them with an icy dignity, or by a platitude which encouraged him to redouble his onslaught, but yielded often to a warmly sympathetic attitude; “As for being good,” went on Saint-Loup, “you say I have been to you, but I haven’t been good at all, my aunt tells me that it’s you who avoid her, that you never said a word to her. She wondered whether you had anything against her.”