“Oh,” he thought, “if only she were as lovely as Isabelle.”
And again his eyes followed the line of the neck and shoulders whose almost luminous surface magnetised him. He gave no thought to the injustice and impropriety of the comparison. And yet he admitted with a secret joy:
“She has finer hair. Those black waves of hers must reach to her knees.”
Isabelle turned to smile at him.
“She has finer eyes,” he said to himself again. But those eyes of which he thought looked reproachfully at him and he clearly interpreted their expression.
“Why do you treat me with so little respect?” the faraway Paule seemed to murmur. “Have I tried to lead you on by flirting with you as she does? Have I ever forgotten my dignity or modesty in your presence? If you do not love me, leave me in my lonely peace. Do not degrade my pure youth by making a mere pleasure of my memory. But if you do love me,—yes, if you love me,—why do you not find strength in your love to resist temptations which, for all you know, may ruin the whole course of your life. Come to me unfettered and proud. May I never read degradation in your eyes! I do not know if I am the more beautiful, but I love you, with a love that this woman can never know....”
Jean Berlier was no longer one of those men who go through life with blinders on their eyes, unable to see the broad fields of man’s daily labor which border the narrow path of their own passions. Once he had looked only to his own immediate desires. Now he saw his life fully and saw it whole, and from its source and its development he read the presage of its future. Thus considered, love took on a new aspect. In the place of mere gratification of the senses he put the charm of minds that think together and that inward strength which springs from peace at heart and the quiet life of home; in the place of the brief, violent transports of passion, he put the instinct of the continuity of the race.
Since his return to Savoy three weeks ago, Jean had often gone to Le Maupas. He did not go there solely to comfort two poor sorrowing women. Paule attracted him immensely—by her pride, by her serious depth of feeling, by the youth which he knew her to be holding in check. He noticed with surprise at each of his visits, that this reserved, sensible girl, had a bright, lively spirit, ready to taste joy without timidity as she had tasted sorrow without flinching. With that touching trait of lovers, who try to magnify their love by imagining its extension back into the past, he connected with his present fascination little memories of long ago, of the times when he played with a laughing child Pauline. Forgetful of his own forgetfulness, he imagined an ancient fondness which had survived from childhood. But, still more, with instinctive clearness of vision he felt that his future achievement and the rounding of his life, so that it would not be spent in vain, would depend on her, and on no one else. So he loved her as a man loves at thirty, confidently and tenderly. Her gracious influence filled his heart with a new peace.
Isabelle Orlandi’s passion had thrown itself meantime across his path. Since her marriage for money she had dedicated to her former admirer all the unsatisfied ardor of her senses, all the fury of her tortured heart. She had been much more faithful to her friend Jean than to M. Landeau. She had waited for his return. When she saw him again she was even more fascinated by his serious and thoughtful face than she had been before by his careless good temper, and she promised herself she would wait no longer. For his benefit she displayed the full fascination of her loveliness.
In the box at the theatre, she had indeed triumphed for a few wild moments, though she did not know it. During the whole of the act she had doubted her power to charm because of the hesitations of this Adonis whose spoken words were so ambiguous. When the curtain went down, her only wish was to take up the interrupted conversation again.