"You are ungrateful. What more do you want? To marry me?… Do you remember the old days when you had eyes only for my pretty cousin? I was sad then because you would not understand what I felt for you. Our whole lives might have been changed. Now I think it was better as it has been; it is better that we should never expose our friendship to the test of common life, the daily life, in which even the purest must be debased…."
"You say that because you love me less."
"Oh no! I love you just the same."
"Ah! That is the first time you have told me."
"There must be nothing hidden from us now. You see, I have not much faith in marriage left. Mine, I know, was not a very good example. But I have thought and looked about me. Happy marriages are very rare. It is a little against nature. You cannot bind together the wills of two people without mutilating one of them, if not both, and it does not even bring the suffering through which it is well and profitable for the soul to pass."
"Ah!" he said. "But I can see in it a fine thing—the union of two sacrifices, two souls merged into one."
"A fine thing, in your dreams. In reality you would suffer more than any one."
"What! You think I could never have a wife, a family, children?… Don't say that! I should love them so! You think it impossible for me to have that happiness?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. Perhaps with a good woman, not very intelligent, not very beautiful, who would be devoted to you, and would not understand you."
"How unkind of you!… But you are wrong to make fun of it. A good woman is a fine thing, even if she has no mind."