Here and there—one in a million—there is a female thing that can love like this, once and forever.
Such an one is dedicated, birth upwards, to the Mater Dolorosa.
He had something nearer akin to affection for her than he had ever had in his life for anything, but he was never in love with her—no more in love with her than with the moss-rosebuds that she fastened in his breast. Yet he played with her, because she was such a little, soft, tempting female thing; and because, to see her face flush, and her heart heave, to feel her fresh feelings stir into life, and to watch her changes from shyness to confidence, and from frankness again into fear, was a natural pastime in the lazy golden weather.
That he spared her as far as he did,—when after all she would have married Jeannot anyhow,—and that he sketched her face in the open air, and never entered her hut and never beguiled her to his own old palace in the city, was a new virtue in himself for which he hardly knew whether to feel respect or ridicule; anyway, it seemed virtue to him.
So long as he did not seduce the body, it seemed to him that it could never matter how he slew the soul,—the little, honest, happy, pure, frank soul, that amidst its poverty and hardships was like a robin's song to the winter sun.
"Hoot, toot, pretty innocent, so you are no better than the rest of us," hissed her enemy, Lisette, the fruit girl, against her as she went by the stall one evening as the sun set. "Prut! so it was no such purity after all that made you never look at the student lads and the soldiers, eh? You were so dainty of taste, you must needs pick and choose, and, Lord's sake, after all your coyness, to drop at a beckoning finger as one may say—pong!—in a minute, like an apple over-ripe! Oh hé, you sly one!"
Bébée flushed red, in a sort of instinct of offence; not sure what her fault was, but vaguely stung by the brutal words.
Bébée walked homeward by him, with her empty baskets: looked at him with grave wondering eyes.
"What did she mean? I do not understand. I must have done some wrong—or she thinks so. Do you know?"
Flamen laughed, and answered her evasively,—