“Is it swearing to give your sacred word?—Well, from that day I have worked in this room like a lost creature at shirt-making at twenty-eight sous apiece, so as to live by honest labor. For a month I have had nothing to eat but potatoes, that I might keep myself a good girl and worthy of Lucien, who loves me and respects me as a pattern of virtue. I have made my declaration before the police to recover my rights, and submitted to two years’ surveillance. They are ready enough to enter your name on the lists of disgrace, but make every difficulty about scratching it out again. All I asked of Heaven was to enable me to keep my resolution.
“I shall be nineteen in the month of April; at my age there is still a chance. It seems to me that I was never born till three months ago.—I prayed to God every morning that Lucien might never know what my former life had been. I bought that Virgin you see there, and I prayed to her in my own way, for I do not know any prayers; I cannot read nor write, and I have never been into a church; I have never seen anything of God excepting in processions, out of curiosity.”
“And what do you say to the Virgin?”
“I talk to her as I talk to Lucien, with all my soul, till I make him cry.”
“Oh, so he cries?”
“With joy,” said she eagerly, “poor dear boy! We understand each other so well that we have but one soul! He is so nice, so fond, so sweet in heart and mind and manners! He says he is a poet; I say he is god.—Forgive me! You priests, you see, don’t know what love is. But, in fact, only girls like me know enough of men to appreciate such as Lucien. A Lucien, you see, is as rare as a woman without sin. When you come across him you can love no one else; so there! But such a being must have his fellow; so I want to be worthy to be loved by my Lucien. That is where my trouble began. Last evening, at the opera, I was recognized by some young men who have no more feeling than a tiger has pity—for that matter, I could come round the tiger! The veil of innocence I had tried to wear was worn off; their laughter pierced my brain and my heart. Do not think you have saved me; I shall die of grief.”
“Your veil of innocence?” said the priest. “Then you have treated Lucien with the sternest severity?”
“Oh, Father, how can you, who know him, ask me such a question!” she replied with a smile. “Who can resist a god?”
“Do not be blasphemous,” said the priest mildly. “No one can be like God. Exaggeration is out of place with true love; you had not a pure and genuine love for your idol. If you had undergone the conversion you boast of having felt, you would have acquired the virtues which are a part of womanhood; you would have known the charm of chastity, the refinements of modesty, the two virtues that are the glory of a maiden.—You do not love.”
Esther’s gesture of horror was seen by the priest, but it had no effect on the impassibility of her confessor.