“Yes, with you.”
“A dark chapel, lighted only by the altar lamp? It seems to me that one’s heart is like that.”
“One’s heart?”
“Yes, the heart is in darkness, unknown. But the lamp which shines in the sanctuary is our love. It is there, watching and praying. To love is to understand oneself more clearly, to take one’s impulses and thoughts out of the shadow. We do not take faults and crimes out of the shadow. And since love is light, it is also the desire to make ourselves better.” And then very low, as if to herself, she added:
“As for myself, the more I love, the less I can do evil.”
But when would she have done so? When had she not loved?
She rarely expressed herself at so great length. The flame which watches and prays shone from her eyes all over her face; carried away by her subject her every feature reflected the light of which she had spoken. Had I been away from the theatre, the world, and its false conception of life, I might have adored her for her simple lesson of love, her ineffable avowal of tenderness. The air of the Sleeping Woods suddenly refreshed me. I drank from those springs of youth and felt their purifying virtue.
The curtain rose again. And once more the great wave of sophisms and errors, of erratic folly and passional disorder, surged up, rolled over the public and submerged it. I believe that in the whole theatre there was only this young woman against whom it struck and broke in vain. I did not realise the beauty of the spectacle.
“She is sweet,” I thought, in a moment of gentleness, “but still a little childish. She does not understand these devastating passions which sweep away everything. One should be able to comprehend what one has not experienced even; she goes through life with blinders on her eyes; she does not wish to see anything outside of her own narrow little life, straight ahead of her.”
In good faith, I dared to think: “her little life—”