"Why not?" continued the other; "the age boasts of being a revolutionary one, and it has never ventured upon what the pettiest legislator of antiquity undertook without hesitation—interference with morals."
"I see what you mean," replied André de Sauve; "you would assimilate marriages with funerals—first, second, or third class——."
None of the guests who were amused by this tirade and the reply, amid the brightness of the crystal, the dresses of the women, the pyramids of fruit and the clusters of flowers, suspected the indignation which such talk aroused in Hubert. Who would notice the silent and modest youth at one end of the table? He himself, however, felt wounded to the very soul in the inmost convictions of his childhood and his youth, and he glanced by stealth at Theresa. She did not utter fifty words during this dinner. She seemed to have wandered in thought far away from the conversation which she was supposed to control, and, as though accustomed to this absence of mind, no one sought to interrupt her reverie. She used to pass whole hours in this way, absorbed in herself. Her pale complexion became warmer; the brilliancy of her eyes was, so to speak, turned within; and her teeth appeared small and close through her half-opened lips. What was she thinking of at minutes such as these, and by what secret magic were these same minutes those which acted most strongly upon the imagination of those who were sensible of her charm?
A physiologist would doubtless have attributed these sudden torpors to passages of nervous emotion, were they not the token of a sensual aberration against which the poor creature struggled with all her strength. Hubert had seen in the silence of that evening only a delicate woman's disapprobation of the talk of her friends and her husband, and he had found it a supreme pleasure to go up to her and talk to her on leaving the dinner-table, at which his dearest beliefs had been wounded. He had seated himself beneath the gaze of her eyes, now limpid once more, in one of the corners of the drawing-room—an apartment furnished completely in the modern style, and which, with its opulence that made it like a little museum, its plushes, its ancient stuffs, and its Japanese trinkets, contrasted with the severe apartments in the Rue Vaneau as absolutely as the lives of Madame Castel and Madame Liauran could contrast with the life of Madame de Sauve.
Instead of recognising this evident difference and making it a starting-point for studying the newness of the world in which he found himself, Hubert gave himself up to a feeling very natural in those whose childhood has been passed in an atmosphere of feminine solicitude. Accustomed by the two noble creatures who had watched over his childhood always to associate the idea of a woman with something inexpressibly delicate and pure, it was inevitable that the awakening of love should in his case be accomplished in a sort of religious and reverential emotion. He must extend to the person he loved, whoever she might be, all the devotion that he had conceived for the saints whose son he was.
A prey to this strange confusion of ideas, he had, on that very first evening on his return home, spoken of Theresa to his mother and his grandmother, who were waiting for him, in terms which had necessarily aroused the mistrust of the two women. He understood that now. But what young man has ever begun to love without being hurried by the sweet intoxication of the beginnings of a passion into confidences that were irreparable, and too often deathful, to the future of his feelings?
In what manner and by what stage had this feeling entered into him? He could not have told that. When once a man loves, does it not seem as though he has always loved? Scenes were evoked, nevertheless, which reminded Hubert of the insensible habituation which had led him to visit Theresa several times a week. But had he not been gradually introduced at her house to all her friends, and, as soon as he had left his card, had he not found himself invited in all directions into that world which he scarcely knew, and which was composed partly of high functionaries of the fallen administration, partly of great manufacturers and political financiers, and partly, again, of celebrated artists and wealthy foreigners.
It formed a society free from constraint and full of luxury, pleasure and life, but one the tone of which ought to have displeased the young man, for he could not comprehend its qualities of elegance and refinement, and he was very sensible of its terrible fault—the want of silence, of moral life, and of long custom. Ah! he was not much concerned with observations of this kind, occupied solely as he was to know where he should perceive Madame de Sauve and her eyes. He called to mind countless times at which he had met her—sometimes at her own house, seated at the corner of her fireplace, towards the close of the afternoon, and lost in one of her silent reveries; sometimes visiting in full costume and smiling with her Herodias lips at conversations about dresses or bonnets; sometimes in the front of a box at a theatre and talking in undertones during an interval; sometimes in the tumult of the street, dashing along behind her bright bay horse and bowing her head at the window with a graceful movement.
The recollection of this carriage produced a new association of ideas in Hubert, and he could see again the moment at which he had confessed the secret of his feelings for the first time. Madame de Sauve and he had met that day about five o'clock in a drawing-room in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and as it was beginning to rain in torrents the young woman had proposed to Hubert, who had come on foot, to take him in her carriage, having, she said, a visit to pay near the Rue Vaneau, which would enable her to leave him at his door on the way. He had, in fact, taken his seat beside her in the narrow double brougham lined with green leather, in which there lingered something of that subtle atmosphere which makes the carriage of an elegant woman a sort of little boudoir on wheels, with all the trifling objects belonging to a pretty interior. The hot-water jar was growing lukewarm beneath their feet; the glass, set in its sheath in front, awaited a glance; the memorandum book placed in the nook, with its pencil and visiting cards, spoke of worldly tasks; the clock hanging on the right marked the rapid flight of those sweet minutes. A half-opened book, slipped into the place where portable purchases are usually put, showed that Theresa had obtained the fashionable novel at the bookseller's.
Outside in the streets, where the lamps were beginning to light up, there was the wildness of a glacial winter storm. Theresa, wrapped in a long cloak which showed the outlines of her figure, was silent. In the triple reflection from the carriage lamps, the gas in the street and the expiring day, she was so divinely pale and beautiful that Hubert, overpowered by emotion, took her hand. She did not withdraw it; she looked at him with motionless eyes, that were drowned, as it were, in tears which she would not have dared to shed. Without even hearing the sound of his own words, so intoxicated was he by this look, he said to her: