"Ah! but if you should love me, Thérèse! Do not take your hands away! Have you not given me leave to be a sort of friend to you?"
"I have told you that I was fond of you; you replied that you could not believe in a woman's friendship."
"I might, perhaps, believe in yours; you must have a man's heart, since you have a man's strength and talent. Give it to me."
"I have not taken yours, and I propose to try to be a man for you," she replied; "but I don't quite know how to go about it. A man's friendship should be more outspoken and authoritative than I feel capable of being. In spite of myself, I shall pity you more than I shall scold you, as you see already! I had made up my mind to humiliate you to-day, to make you angry with me and yourself; instead of which, here I am weeping with you, and that doesn't advance matters at all."
"Yes, it does! yes, it does!" cried Laurent. "These tears do me good, they have watered the parched place; perhaps my heart will grow again there! Ah! Thérèse, you told me once, when I boasted before you of things that I should have blushed for, that I was a prison-wall. You forgot only one thing: that there is a prisoner behind that wall! If I could open the door, you would see him; but the door is closed, the wall is of bronze, and not my will, nor my faith, nor my affection, nor even my voice can penetrate it. Must I then live and die thus? What will it avail me, I ask you, to have daubed the walls of my dungeon with a few fanciful pictures, if the word love is written nowhere there?"
"If I understand you," said Thérèse dreamily, "you think that your work needs to be enlivened by sentiment."
"Do not you think so, too? Is not that what all your reproaches say?"
"Not precisely. There is only too much fire in your execution; the critics blame you for it. For my part, I have always felt deep respect for that youthful exuberance which makes great artists, and the beauties of which prevent any one who has true enthusiasm from harping upon its defects. Far from considering your work cold and positive, it seems to me burning and impassioned; but I have tried to make out where the seat of that passion was; I see now: it is in the craving of the heart. Yes," she added, still musing, as if she were seeking to pierce the veil of her own thought, "desire certainly may be a passion."
"Well, what are you thinking about?" said Laurent, following her absorbed glance.
"I am wondering if I ought to declare war on this power that is in you, and if, by persuading you to be happy and tranquil, I should not quench the sacred fire. And yet—I fancy that aspiration cannot be a durable condition of the mind, and that, when it has been earnestly expressed during its feverish stage, it must either subside of itself or overpower us. What do you say? Has not each age its special force and manifestation? Are not what we call the different manners of a master, simply the expression of the successive transformations of his being? At thirty, will it be possible for you to have aspired to everything without attaining anything? Will you not be compelled to adopt some fixed theory touching some point or other? You are at the age of caprice; but soon will come the age of light. Do you not wish to make progress?"