She sat up, and her graceful movement seemed to shed gleams of light.
"Does not a girl who allows a man to take her hand make a promise, and ought she not to keep it? You know full well that I can never be yours. Two feelings rule the love that attracts the women of this earth: either they devote themselves to suffering creatures, degraded and guilty, whom they desire to comfort, to raise, to redeem; or they give themselves wholly to superior beings, sublime and strong, whom they are fain to worship and understand—by whom they are too often crushed. You have been degraded, but you have purified yourself in the fires of repentance, and you now are great; I feel myself too small to be your equal, and I am too religious to humble myself to any power but that of the Most High. Your life, my friend, may thus be stated; we are in the North, among the clouds, where abstractions are familiar to our minds."
"Seraphita, you kill me when you talk so," he replied. "It is always torture to me to see you thus apply the monstrous science which strips all human things of the properties they derive from time, space, form, when you regard them mathematically under some ultimate simplest expression, as geometry does with bodies, abstracting dimensions from substance."
"Well, Wilfrid, I submit.—Look at this bearskin rug which my poor David has spread. What do you think of it?"
"I like it very well."
"You did not know I had that Doucha Greka?"
It was a sort of pelisse made of cashmere lined with black fox-skin; the name means, "warm to the soul."
"Do you suppose," said she, "that any sovereign in any court possesses a fur wrap to match it?"
"It is worthy of her who wears it!"
"And whom you think very beautiful?"