“Good,” she said. “I have found a better use for your time than to waste it on cards. The end will be that where others must sooner or later be losers you will invariably win.”
“How so?”
“The letter will tell you,” she said, with a playful smile, which took from her advice the serious tone which might certainly have been that of a grandfather.
The countess talked to me for an hour, and proved the depth of her affection by the study she had made of my nature during the last three months. She penetrated the recesses of my heart, entering it with her own; the tones of her voice were changeful and convincing; the words fell from maternal lips, showing by their tone as well as by their meaning how many ties already bound us to each other.
“If you knew,” she said in conclusion, “with what anxiety I shall follow your course, what joy I shall feel if you walk straight, what tears I must shed if you strike against the angles! Believe that my affection has no equal; it is involuntary and yet deliberate. Ah, I would that I might see you happy, powerful, respected,—you who are to me a living dream.”
She made me weep, so tender and so terrible was she. Her feelings came boldly to the surface, yet they were too pure to give the slightest hope even to a young man thirsting for pleasure. Ignoring my tortured flesh, she shed the rays, undeviating, incorruptible, of the divine love, which satisfies the soul only. She rose to heights whither the prismatic pinions of a love like mine were powerless to bear me. To reach her a man must needs have won the white wings of the seraphim.
“In all that happens to me I will ask myself,” I said, “‘What would my Henriette say?’”
“Yes, I will be the star and the sanctuary both,” she said, alluding to the dreams of my childhood.
“You are my light and my religion,” I cried; “you shall be my all.”
“No,” she answered; “I can never be the source of your pleasures.”