He made a tentative effort, however, by a suggestion half seriously offered.
“Mon ami, you were in love with her yourself.”
François echoed his light laugh. “No,” he declared. “No. My feeling for her now is what it has always been. I have paid her the compliment of thinking of her in a different way from every other woman I ever met. And I’ve never arrived at defining that way to myself. An English writer—I’m boring you to death with English writers to-day,—comes nearest to it in his definition of religion. He says ‘religion is morality touched by emotion.’
“Well, I believe what I have always felt for Anne Page is affectionate morality,” he laughed again, “strict morality mind, touched with emotion.”
“Have you seen her lately?”
“I saw her last June, for the first time in three or four years.”
“She’s altered, of course?”
“She has. She’s more beautiful. She’s really beautiful now, so that even the turnip-headed people she lives among see and acknowledge it.”
“That’s rather wonderful.”
“You would think so, if you saw her with them. She’s the village goddess and oracle. Giving to charities with both hands, petitioned for advice and counsel, loved by every one, high and low. That’s not surprising. Nor is it more surprising, I suppose, that she’s happy. Her nature is essentially simple and maternal. She ought to have had children and children’s children by now.”