es
and his soul, she might submit herself passively to his fierce caresses,
but she had her _nec plus ultra_ of passion; and when once it was
reached, she grew angry if he lost the mastery of himself and made
as though he would pass beyond. No woman on earth can brave the
consequences of refusal without some motive; nothing is more natural
than to yield to love; wherefore Mme de Langeais promptly raised a
second line of fortification, a stronghold less easy to carry than
the first. She evoked the terrors of religion. Never did Father of
the Church, however eloquent, plead the cause of God better than the
Duchess. Never was the wrath of the Most High better justified than
by her voice. She used no preacher's commonplaces, no rhetorical
amplifications. No. She had a "pulpit-tremor" of her own. To Armand's
most passionate entreaty, she replied with a tearful gaze, and a gesture
in which a terrible plenitude of emotion found expression. She stopped
his mouth with an appeal for mercy. She would not hear another word; if
she did, she must succumb; and better death than criminal happiness.

"Is it nothing to disobey God?" she asked him, recovering a voice grown
faint in the crises of inward struggles, through which the fair
actress appeared to find it hard to preserve her self-control. "I would
sacrifice society, I would give up the whole world for you, gladly; but
it is very selfish of you to ask my whole after-life of me for a moment
of pleasure. Come, now! are you not happy?" she added, holding out her
hand; and certainly in her careless toilette the sight of her afforded
consolations to her lover, who made the most of them.

Sometimes from policy, to keep her hold on a man whose ardent passion
gave her emotions unknown before, sometimes in weakness, she suffered
him to snatch a swift kiss; and immediately, in feigned terror, she
flushed red and exiled Armand from the sofa so soon as the sofa became
dangerous ground.

"Your joys are sins for me to expiate, Armand; they are paid for by
penitence and remorse," she cried.

And Montriveau, now at two chairs' distance from that aristocratic
petticoat, betook himself to blasphemy and railed against Providence.
The Duchess grew angry at such times.

"My friend," she said drily, "I do not understand why you decline to
believe in God, for it is impossible to believe in man. Hush, do not
talk like that. You have too great a nature to take up their Liberal
nonsense with its pret