The wind understood me and the urn swallowed it.
When the heart is truly alive the least trifles are important.
* * *
In later years M. Mairieux consented to tell me how he had learned his daughter’s secret. It was later, much later, after we had lost her, and I was questioning him greedily about the past. I had envied him the possession of this secret, but it was just that he should have received it, and not me. After twenty years of boundless and absolutely unselfish affection, what an advantage he had over me!
When he entered Raymonde’s rooms, she was standing by the threshold of the window, motionless, inert, almost indifferent. He told her of my impatience, my unhappiness. Nevertheless, he said, she should take counsel only of her own heart. The material advantages of a marriage should only be a secondary consideration.
She kept repeating obstinately:
“No, no, I do not want to marry him.”
“But why?”
“M. Cernay is not the husband for me.”
He was tempted to stop there. A presentiment, which he took to be paternal selfishness warned him, as he confessed to me, warned him not to insist. Conscientious scruples, however, and the desire to exhaust every argument in favour of the alliance, urged him to add: