"It seems to me," said Julie, with a gentle smile, "you take a wondrous moral tone in treating of a ball, my pretty sage; and, notwithstanding all you say, I suspect you like a fête as well as most young women."
"Julie, when I tell you honestly I hate it—that I would gladly be hidden in the roof or the cellar of the loneliest tower in the chateau upon that evening, you will cease to suspect me of so poor a dissimulation. Honestly, then, and sadly, these crowded festivities, I expected but a short time since with so much delight, are now not only indifferent to me, but repulsive. I no longer wish to meet and mix with people; the idea, on the contrary, depresses, nay, even terrifies me."
"Lucille, you are hiding something from me."
"Hiding!—no, nothing—that is, nothing but my own thoughts, the images of my reflections; nothing, dear Julie, that it would not render you unhappy to hear. Why should I throw upon your mind the gloom and shadows of my own?"
"But perhaps your troubles are fantastic and unreal; and, were you to confide in me, I might convince you that they are so."
"Julie, they are real."
"So thinks every body who is haunted by chimeras."
"These are none. Oh, Julie! would I could tell you all. The agony of the relation would be in some sort recompensed by having one human being to tell my thoughts to. But it cannot be; it is quite, quite impossible."
"This impossibility is also one of the imagination."
"No, no, Julie; the effort to repose this confidence would destroy all confidence between us. I have said enough—let us speak of other matters. My innermost grief, be it what it may, I must endure alone. Julie, it is a hard condition; but I must and will—alone."