"How can we help it, Jean Oullier?"
"Easily. As you cannot be the husband of the woman you love, you must not be the husband of the woman you don't love. Now it is my opinion that Mary's grief will get easier when that pain is taken away from her. For she may say what she pleases; there's always a touch of jealousy at the bottom of a woman's heart, however tender it may be."
"Renounce both the hope of making Mary my wife and the consolation of seeing her? Impossible! I can't do it. I tell you, Jean Oullier, that to get nearer to Mary I would go through hell-fire."
"Phrases, my young gentleman, phrases! The world has been consoled for being turned out of paradise, and at your age a man can always forget the woman he loves. Besides, the thing that ought to separate you from Mary is something else than hell-fire. It may be the dead body of her sister; for you don't yet know what an undisciplined child it is that goes by the name of Bertha, nor of what she is capable, I don't understand, poor fool of a peasant that I am, all your fine sentiments; but it seems to me the grandest of them ought to pause before an obstacle of this sort."
"But what can I do, my friend? What shall I do? Advise me."
"All the trouble comes, as I think, from your not having the character of your sex. You must now do what a person of the sex to which by your manners and your weakness you seem to belong would do under the circumstances. You have not known how to master the situation in which fate placed you; and now you must flee from it."
"Flee from it! But did you hear Mary say the other day that if I renounced her sister she would never see me again?"
"What of that, if she respects you?"
"But think of all I shall have to suffer!"
"You won't suffer at a distance more than you will suffer here."