Thus, the very respect that he instinctively felt for her, impelled her to love him.
She had not been accustomed to such treatment. Every masculine look that since her puberty she had felt riveted upon her, clearly expressed even before the lips spoke: "You are beautiful. You please me. Will you?" Rosas, at least, said: "I love you," before: "I desire you."
Tainted in the body which she had given, offered, abandoned, sold, she felt that she was respected by him even in that body, and although she considered him silly, she thought him superior to all others, or at least different, and that was a sufficient motive for loving him.
One day she said to him in a peculiar tone and with her distracting smile:
"Do you know, my dear José, there is one thing I should not have believed? You are bashful!"
He turned slightly pale.
"Sincere love is always bashful and clumsy. By that it may be known."
"Perhaps!" said Marianne.
Their conversations, however, only concerned love, so that Rosas might speak of his passion or of his reminiscences.
She once asked him if he would despise a woman if she became his mistress.