“Ah, my poor child of eighteen, what can you know of love?” she said smiling. “Well, well, so be it!” she added, “it is a fair subject of conversation, like the weather when one pays a visit. You shall find that I have neither false modesty nor petty fears. I can hear the word love without blushing; it has been so often said to me without one echo of the heart that I think it quite unmeaning. I have met with it everywhere, in books, at the theatre, in society,—yes, everywhere, and never have I found in it even a semblance of its magnificent ideal.”
“Did you seek that ideal?”
“Yes.”
The word was said with such perfect ease and freedom that the young man made a gesture of surprise and looked at Marie fixedly, as if he had suddenly changed his opinion on her character and real position.
“Mademoiselle,” he said with ill-concealed devotion, “are you maid or wife, angel or devil?”
“All,” she replied, laughing. “Isn’t there something diabolic and also angelic in a young girl who has never loved, does not love, and perhaps will never love?”
“Do you think yourself happy thus?” he asked with a free and easy tone and manner, as though already he felt less respect for her.
“Oh, happy, no,” she replied. “When I think that I am alone, hampered by social conventions that make me deceitful, I envy the privileges of a man. But when I also reflect on the means which nature has bestowed on us women to catch and entangle you men in the invisible meshes of a power which you cannot resist, then the part assigned to me in the world is not displeasing to me. And then again, suddenly, it does seem very petty, and I feel that I should despise a man who allowed himself to be duped by such vulgar seductions. No sooner do I perceive our power and like it, than I know it to be horrible and I abhor it. Sometimes I feel within me that longing towards devotion which makes my sex so nobly beautiful; and then I feel a desire, which consumes me, for dominion and power. Perhaps it is the natural struggle of the good and the evil principle in which all creatures live here below. Angel or devil! you have expressed it. Ah! to-day is not the first time that I have recognized my double nature. But we women understand better than you men can do our own shortcomings. We have an instinct which shows us a perfection in all things to which, nevertheless, we fail to attain. But,” she added, sighing as she glanced at the sky; “that which enhances us in your eyes is—”
“Is what?” he said.
“—that we are all struggling, more or less,” she answered, “against a thwarted destiny.”