"Ah! how I love you!"
She grew still more pale, and laid her gloved hand upon his mouth to make him be silent. He began to kiss this hand madly, seeking for the place where the opening of the glove allowed him to feel the living warmth of the wrist. She replied to this caress by that word which all women utter at like moments—a word so simple, but one into which creep so many inflexions, from the most mortal indifference to the most emotional tenderness—
"You are a child."
"Do you love me a little?" he asked her.
And then, as she looked at him with those same eyes which sent forth a ray of happiness, he could hear her murmur in a stifled voice:
"A great deal."
For most Parisian young men, such a scene would have been the prelude to an effort towards the complete possession of a woman so evidently smitten—an effort which might, perhaps, have miscarried; for a woman of the world who wishes to protect herself finds many means, if she be anything of a coquette, of avoiding a surrender, even after avowals of the kind, or still more compromising marks of attachment. But there was as little coquetry in the case of Madame de Sauve as there was physical daring in that of the child of twenty-two who loved her. Did not these two beings find themselves placed by chance in a situation of the strangest delicacy? He was incapable of any further enterprise by reason of his entire purity. As for her, how could she fail to understand that to offer herself to him was to risk a diminution of his love? Such difficulties are less rare under the conditions imposed upon the feelings by modern manners than the fatuity of men will allow.
As manners are at present, all action between two persons who love each other simultaneously becomes a sign, and how could a woman who knows this fail to hesitate about compromising her happiness for ever by seeking to embrace it too soon? Did Theresa obey this prudential motive, or did she, perchance, find a heart's delight of delicious novelty in the burning respect of her friend? With all men whom she had met before this one, love had been only a disguised form of desire, and desire itself an intoxicated form of self-pride. But whatever the reason might be, she granted the young man all the meetings that he asked for during the months following this first avowal, and all these meetings remained as essentially innocent as they were clandestine.
While the Boulogne train was carrying Hubert towards the most longed-for of these meetings he remembered the former ones—those passionate and dangerous walks, nearly all hazarded across early Paris. They had in this way adventured their ingenuous and guilty idyll in all the places in which it seemed unlikely that anyone belonging to their set would meet them. How many times, for instance, had they visited the towers of Notre Dame, where Theresa loved to walk in her youthful grace amid the old stone monsters carved on the balustrades? Through the slender ogive windows of the ascent they looked alternately at the horizon of the river confined between the quays, and that of the street confined between the houses. In one of the buildings crouching in the shadow of the cathedral, on the side of the Rue de Chanoinesse, there was a small apartment on the fifth storey running out into a terrace, behind the panes of which they used to imagine the existence of a romance similar to their own, because they had twice seen a young woman and a young man breakfasting there, seated at the same round table, with the window half open.
Sometimes the squalls of the December wind would roar round the pile, and storms of melted snow would heat upon the walls. Theresa was none the less punctual to the appointment, leaving her cab before the great doorway and crossing the church to go out of it at the side, and there join Hubert in the dark peristyle which comes before the towers. Her delicate teeth shone in her pretty smile, and her slender figure appeared still more elegant in this ornament of the ancient city. Her happy grace seemed to work even upon the old caretaker who, surrounded by her cats, gives out the tickets from the depths of her lodge, for she used to give her a grateful smile.