As soon as she can get away on any excuse, she runs across to me. Flushed and laughing, she hurls herself into my arms with all the violence of a catastrophe; she crushes my cheek with a vehement kiss which waits for no response; and my hair catches in the rough hands squeezing my head. Smiling, I cannot help warding off the attack, while she pours out a torrent of incoherent words at the top of her voice....
During our early talks, I tried speaking very quietly, as a hint that she should do the same. She would shake the house with the thunder of her most intimate confidences, bellowed after the fashion of the peasants, who are accustomed to keep up a conversation from one end of a field to the other. As I obtained no result, I had to speak to her about it; and, because I did so as delicately as possible, in order not to wound her feelings, she burst into a roar of laughter which showed me that her rustic life had robbed her of all sensitiveness.
Being now authorised to admonish her at all times with regard to her gestures, her voice and her accent, I often make her repeat the same sentence; and, when I at last hear her natural voice, her original sweet and attractive voice, to which the music is beginning to return, shily and timidly, my heart overflows with joy. But, two minutes after, she is again bawling out her most trivial remarks, with a cheerful unconcern that disarms my wrath. Then I plead for silence as I would for mercy, draw her down upon my lap, take her head in my arms and nurse her as I would a child.
2
The stillness is so intense in the grove where we are sitting side by side, I am so anxious for her to feel it, that I become impatient and irritable. When I am with her, I am in a perpetual ferment. Her beauty and her coarseness hurt me, like two ill-matched colours that attract and wound the eyes. I calm myself by scattering all my thoughts over her promiscuously; and, though most of them are carried away by the wind, I imagine that I am sprinkling them on her life to make it blossom anew.
"I am nursing you in my arms to wake you, my Roseline, just as one nurses children to put them to sleep. See what poor creatures we are! As a rule, it is the conventions and constraint of our upbringing, with all its artificiality and falsehood, that divide us. To-day, it is the opposite that rises between you and me and spoils our happiness! I have often longed to meet a woman who was so simple as to be almost uncivilised; and, now that you are here, I dread your gestures and your voice, which grate upon me and annoy me!"
"But am I not simple?" Rose asks, ingenuously.
"People generally confuse simplicity with ignorance, too often also with silliness—which is not the case with you," I added, with a smile. "Real, that is to say, conscious simplicity is not even recognised; and, when it becomes active, it appears to vulgar minds a danger that must be averted. The better to attack it, they disfigure it. It is this proud and noble grace that I want you to acquire. Look, it may be compared with this diamond which I wear on my finger. The stone is absolutely simple; and yet through how many hands has it passed before becoming so! How many transformations has it undergone! How magnificent is its bare simplicity when set off by the plain gold ring! It is the same with us. For simplicity to be beautiful in us, we must have cut and polished our soul and person many times over. Above all, we must have learnt the harmony of things and become fixed in that knowledge, like the stone which you see held in these gold claws."
She asked, with an effort to modulate her voice:
"Oughtn't I to take you for my model?"