“Oh, yes, I am.”
I could not deceive her by my weak protestations.
“No, you’re not. You can’t be. And I shall never know how to please you.”
I condescendingly consoled her. I promised to direct and form her. And when I questioned her (what made me do it?) about the impression which Mme. de H— had produced on her, I received, after a moment’s hesitation, this abrupt reply:
“She is indecent. Don’t you think so?”
Frankness pleases us so little when it is at variance with our concealed views and inclinations that I was offended by her remark. As the result of this first contact with a sphere which love had temporarily abolished, was I beginning to lose or even reject the sweet simplicity which had been poured into my heart by the little maiden of the Sleeping Woods?
If the most insignificant details and conversations of that evening come back to me, it is because in reality nothing happened that was not important. Memory does not encumber itself with frivolities: that which is of no value it lets escape as water flows through one’s fingers. What stays, one may often undervalue, but the day comes at length when it is perceived to be of real worth.
Raymonde’s unsuccessful effort, and even more her fear, which wounded me sensibly; the many moments when I turned from her and her truthful face for some tangle of youth and beauty, some fabric of bleached hair and painted lips and assumed merriment, some embodiment of all the usual artful powers of feminine enslavement;—in a single evening, in a single place, I saw these things grouped before me, calling up visions of my errors and the distant but certain causes of the misfortune or the crime toward which I was advancing—
* * *
—Toward which I was advancing, but not without hesitations and glances back. One cannot quickly or entirely throw off a past in which one has securely attained, in spite of oneself, to some marvellous state of sweetness, rectitude and cheer. The most diverse sentiments, far from excluding each other, often exist quietly side by side, preserving that fatal ignorance that shall finally rend us in twain.