"I regret making you unhappy. But I didn't know you then, my friend. I was free and alone; I had no obligations except to myself."
"Is that nothing?" he thought. He did not dare to say it.
"But still you regret it?" he said, insistently. "You know very well you made a mistake."
He did not want to accuse her. But he so longed to have her accuse herself.
"Perhaps," she said.
"Perhaps," he took her up, dejectedly.
"I don't know," said Annette.
She saw where Julien wanted to lead her. Perhaps she had made a mistake, if yielding to a transport of sincere love and pity was a mistake. Perhaps, yes. "But if in my heart I can regret a sincere error, I don't need to excuse myself for it. My heart has remained alone with its suffering, communing with it alone in the silence. It must commune now with its regrets. They concern nobody. . . . Regrets? . . . Let's be honest to the end! There are no regrets!" After reflecting, she said, "I don't think I made a mistake."
Perhaps she was exaggerating in reaction against Julien's unconscious pharisaism. (Poor Julien!) But even in the moments when she loved him the most she could not bring herself to utter the word of regret which he was expecting. . . . "I should so much like to say it! But I can't. It isn't true." Regret what? She had acted in accordance not only with her rights but with her happiness. For, costly as the latter had been, she had had it—the child. And she knew (she alone) that this gift of the child, far from dishonoring her, as a stupid public opinion supposed, had purified her, delivered her for a long time from her troubles, brought into her life order and peace. . . . No, for the sake of assuring her future love she would never be base enough to slander her past love. She even felt now a certain gratitude towards this Roger who had only been an agent of her destiny, so inferior to the love and the flame of life he had lighted in her.
Julien felt this jealously. "Ah, you still love that man?" he said.