To-day, for the first time, Doctor Ralph permitted the nurse to take Irene to her mother.
I waited with anxious and irritable impatience for the moment when I would see Irene, hoping from her to have some particulars about her mother, perhaps a word, a remembrance, from Catherine.
Once returned to consciousness, I know not what course Madame de Fersen will take towards me.
During the paroxysm of remorseful despair which follows a first fault, a woman often hates the man to whom she has succumbed; she overwhelms him with reproaches as violent as her regrets, as vehement as her sorrow; it is on him alone the sole responsibility weighs for their guilt; she is not his accomplice, but his victim.
If her soul has remained pure, notwithstanding that for a moment she was involuntarily led astray, she takes the sincere resolution never again to see the man who has seduced her, and to have to weep over one sole betrayal, one sole defeat.
To this resolution she at first remains faithful.
She seeks, not to excuse, but to redeem her error, by the rigorous fulfilment of her duties; but the remembrance of her fault is there, ever there.
The more noble the heart, the more austere the conscience, so will the remorse be the more implacable. Then, alas! she suffers terribly, the poor creature, for she stands alone, and is compelled in secret to devour her tears, while to the world she still wears a smile.
Sometimes, again, she becomes frightened at her isolation, at that wordless concentration of her grief, and she resigns herself to ask for comfort and strength of the man who is the cause of her fall. She then implores him, for the sake of her remorse, to forget a moment of madness, and to be for her no more than the truest of friends, the confidant of the sorrows he has brought upon her. But, alas! almost always the unhappy woman has still more tears to shed.
Man, with the coarser instincts of his sex, does not realise the sublime struggle which woman endures between love and duty. The incessant torture, the menacing terrors aroused in her by the remembrance of outraged religion and family honour, these dreadful tortures are treated by man as ridiculous whims, as childish scruples, or the absurd influence of the confessional.