Suddenly Julie caught up the book that lay beside her and opened it with a hasty hand. It was one of that set of Saint-Simon which had belonged to her mother, and had already played a part in her own destiny.
She turned to the famous "character" of the Dauphin, of that model prince, in whose death Saint-Simon, and Fénelon, and France herself, saw the eclipse of all great hopes.
"A prince, affable, gentle, humane, patient, modest, full of compunctions, and, as much as his position allowed--sometimes beyond it--humble, and severe towards himself."
Was it not to the life? "Affable, doux, humain--patient, modeste--humble et austère pour soi"--beyond what was expected, beyond, almost, what was becoming?
She read on to the mention of the Dauphine, terrified, in her human weakness, of so perfect a husband, and trying to beguile or tempt him from the heights; to the picture of Louis Quatorze, the grandfather, shamed in his worldly old age by the presence beside him of this saintly and high-minded youth; of the Court, looking forward with dismay to the time when it should find itself under the rule of a man who despised and condemned both its follies and its passions, until she reached that final rapture, where, in a mingled anguish and adoration, Saint-Simon bids eternal farewell to a character and a heart of which France was not worthy.
The lines passed before her, and she was conscious, guiltily conscious, of reading them with a double mind.
Then she closed the book, held by the thought of her husband--in a somewhat melancholy reverie.
There is a Catholic word with which in her convent youth she had been very familiar--the word recueilli--"recollected." At no time had it sounded kindly in her ears; for it implied fetters and self--suppressions--of the voluntary and spiritual sort--wholly unwelcome to and unvalued by her own temperament. But who that knew him well could avoid applying it to Delafield? A man of "recollection" living in the eye of the Eternal; keeping a guard over himself in the smallest matters of thought and action; mystically possessed by the passion of a spiritual ideal; in love with charity, purity, simplicity of life.
She bowed her head upon her hands in dreariness of spirit. Ultimately, what could such a man want with her? What had she to give him? In what way could she ever be necessary to him? And a woman, even in friendship, must feel herself that to be happy.
Already this daily state in which she found herself--of owing everything and giving nothing--produced in her a secret irritation and repulsion; how would it be in the years to come?