e might remain forever the loftiest
of women in the eyes of her young lover, over whom she now wished her
power to be eternal.

Her coquetries became the more persistent because she felt within
herself a certain weakness. She played the invalid for a whole week with
charming hypocrisy. Again and again she walked about the velvet turf
which lay between the house and garden leaning on Calyste's arm in
languid dependence.

"Ah! my dear, you are taking him a long journey in a small space," said
Mademoiselle des Touches one day.

Before the excursion to Croisic, the two women were discoursing one
evening about love, and laughing at the different ways that men adopted
to declare it; admitting to themselves that the cleverest men, and
naturally the least loving, did not like to wander in the labyrinths of
sentimentality and went straight to the point,--in which perhaps they
were right; for the result was that those who loved most deeply and
reservedly were, for a time at least, ill-treated.

"They go to work like La Fontaine, when he wanted to enter the Academy,"
said Camille.

Madame de Rochefide had unbounded power to restrain Calyste within the
limits where she meant to keep him; it sufficed her to remind him by a
look or gesture of his horrible violence on the rocks. The eyes of her
poor victim would fill with tears, he was silent, swallowing down
his prayers, his arguments, his sufferings with a heroism that would
certainly have touched any other woman. She finally brought him by
her infernal coquetry to such a pass that he went one day to Camille
imploring her advice.

Beatrix, armed with Calyste's own letter, quoted the passage in which
he said that to love was the first happiness, that of being loved came
later; and she used that axiom to restrain his passion to the limits of
respectful idolatry, which pleased her well. She liked to feel her
soul caressed by those sweet hymns of praise and adoration which
nature suggests to youth; in them is so much artless art; such innocent
seduction is in their cries, their prayers, their exclamations, their
pledges of themselves in the promissory notes which they offer on the
future; to all of which Beatrix was very careful to give no definite
answer. Yes, she heard him; but she doubted! Love was not yet the
question; what he asked of her was permission to love. In fact, that was
all the poor lad really asked for; his mind still clung to the strongest
side of love, the spir