er; to her it was worse in its
effects than an obscene tale. Corruption is relative. There are chaste
and virgin natures which a single thought corrupts, doing all the more
harm because no thought of the duty of resistance has occurred.

The next day Veronique showed the book to the good priest, who approved
the purchase; for what could be more childlike and innocent and pure
than the history of Paul and Virginia? But the warmth of the tropics,
the beauty of the scenery, the almost puerile innocence of a love that
seemed so sacred had done their work on Veronique. She was led by the
sweet and noble achievement of its author to the worship of the Ideal,
that fatal human religion! She dreamed of a lover like Paul. Her
thoughts caressed the voluptuous image of that balmy isle. Childlike,
she named an island in the Vienne, below Limoges and nearly opposite to
the Faubourg Saint-Martial, the Ile de France. Her mind lived there in
the world of fancy all young girls construct,--a world they enrich with
their own perfections. She spent long hours at her window, looking
at the artisans or the mechanics who passed it, the only men whom the
modest position of her parents allowed her to think of. Accustomed, of
course, to the idea of eventually marrying a man of the people, she
now became aware of instincts within herself which revolved from all
coarseness.

In such a situation she naturally made many a romance such as young
girls are fond of weaving. She clasped the idea--perhaps with the
natural ardor of a noble and virgin imagination--of ennobling one of
those men, and of raising him to the height where her own dreams led
her. She may have made a Paul of some young man who caught her eye,
merely to fasten her wild ideas on an actual being, as the mists of a
damp atmosphere, touched by frost, crystallize on the branches of a tree
by the wayside. She must have flung herself deep into the abysses of
her dream, for though she often returned bearing on her brow, as if from
vast heights, some luminous reflections, oftener she seemed to carry in
her hand the flowers that grew beside a torrent she had followed down a
precipice.

On the warm summer evenings she would ask her father to take her on his
arm to the banks of the Vienne, where she went into ecstasies over the
beauties of the sky and fields, the glories of the setting sun, or
the infinite sweetness of the dewy evening. Her soul exhaled itself
thenceforth in a fragrance of na