“Ask it, then; ask it quickly, that you may see how readily it shall be granted.”
“Can you conceive no sacrifice that you would not make to please me?”
“None, that you would ask of me.”
“Theresa, no one can say what another might ask of them. Husbands, lovers, brothers, have asked strange sacrifices—fearful sacrifices, at woman’s hands; and—they have been made.”
“Ask me, then, ask me,” she repeated, smiling, although her face had grown somewhat pale as she listened to his words, and marked his strangely excited manner. “I repeat, there is no sacrifice which you would ask of me, which I will not make. Nay more, there is none which I should think a sacrifice if it is to preserve your love to me, when I feared that I had lost it forever, though how, indeed, I knew not.”
“We shall see,” he said, affecting to muse with himself, and ponder deeply. “We shall see; you are a great historian, and have read of all the celebrated women of times past and present. You have heard of the beautiful Mademoiselle Desvieux, she who—”
“She who was the promised wife of the great, the immortal Bossuet; and who sacrificed her own happiness, freeing her lover from the claims she held on him, lest a wife should be a clog upon his pure yet soaring ambition, lest an earthly affection should wean him from a higher love, and weaken the cords that were drawing him toward heaven! I have—I have heard of her! Who has not—who does not revere her name—who does not love her?”
“And what think you of her sacrifice, Theresa?”
“That it was her duty. A difficult duty to perform, you will say, but still her duty. Her praise is, that she performed it gloriously. And yet I doubt not that her sacrifice bore her its own exceeding great reward. Loving as she loved, all her sorrows must have been changed into exultation, when she saw him in after days the saint he became, the saint she helped to make him.”
“And could you have made such a sacrifice, Theresa?”