“Has Dumay seen Canalis?”
“Yes,” answered her father.
The two walked along in silence.
“So that is why that gentleman,” resumed Modeste, “told me so much harm of poets and poetry; no wonder the little secretary said—Why,” she added, interrupting herself, “his virtues, his noble qualities, his fine sentiments are nothing but an epistolary theft! The man who steals glory and a name may very likely—”
“—break locks, steal purses, and cut people’s throats on the highway,” cried the colonel. “Ah, you young girls, that’s just like you,—with your peremptory opinions and your ignorance of life. A man who once deceives a woman was born under the scaffold on which he ought to die.”
This ridicule stopped Modeste’s effervescence for a moment and least, and again there was silence.
“My child,” said the colonel, presently, “men in society, as in nature everywhere, are made to win the hearts of women, and women must defend themselves. You have chosen to invert the parts. Was that wise? Everything is false in a false position. The first wrong-doing was yours. No, a man is not a monster because he seeks to please a woman; it is our right to win her by aggression with all its consequences, short of crime and cowardice. A man may have many virtues even if he does deceive a woman; if he deceives her, it is because he finds her wanting in some of the treasures that he sought in her. None but a queen, an actress, or a woman placed so far above a man that she seems to him a queen, can go to him of herself without incurring blame—and for a young girl to do it! Why, she is false to all that God has given her that is sacred and lovely and noble,—no matter with what grace or what poetry or what precautions she surrounds her fault.”
“To seek the master and find the servant!” she said bitterly, “oh! I can never recover from it!”
“Nonsense! Monsieur Ernest de La Briere is, to my thinking, fully the equal of the Baron de Canalis. He was private secretary of a cabinet minister, and he is now counsel for the Court of Claims; he has a heart, and he adores you, but—he does not write verses. No, I admit, he is not a poet; but for all that he may have a heart full of poetry. At any rate, my dear girl,” added her father, as Modeste made a gesture of disgust, “you are to see both of them, the sham and the true Canalis—”
“Oh, papa!—”