fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts, cramped each
other and lessened, as reduced to a uniform level of love that equalized
them all. So taking handfuls of the mixed-up letters, he amused himself
for some moments with letting them fall in cascades from his right into
his left hand. At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to
the cupboard, saying to himself, "What a lot of rubbish!" Which summed
up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard,
had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that
which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like
them, leave a name carved upon the wall.

"Come," said he, "let's begin."

He wrote--

"Courage, Emma! courage! I would not bring misery into your life."

"After all, that's true," thought Rodolphe. "I am acting in her
interest; I am honest."

"Have you carefully weighed your resolution? Do you know to what an
abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not, do you? You
were coming confident and fearless, believing in happiness in the
future. Ah! unhappy that we are--insensate!"

Rodolphe stopped here to think of some good excuse.

"If I told her all my fortune is lost? No! Besides that would stop
nothing. It would all have to be begun over again later on. As if one
could make women like that listen to reason!" He reflected, then went
on--

"I shall not forget you, oh! believe it; and I shall ever have a
profound devotion for you; but some day, sooner or later, this
ardour (such is the fate of human things) would have grown less, no
doubt. Lassitude would have come to us, and who knows if I should
not even have had the atrocious pain of witnessing your remorse, of
sharing it myself, since I should have been its cause? The mere
idea of the grief that would come to you tortures me, Emma. Forget
me! Why did I ever know you? Why were you so beautiful? Is it my
fault? O my God! No, no! accuse only fate."

"That's a word that always tells," he said to himself.

"Ah! if you had been one of those frivolous women that one sees,
certainly I might, through egotism, have made an experiment, in
that case without danger for you. But that delicious exaltation, at
once your charm and your torment, has prevented you from
understanding, adorable woman that you are, the falseness of our
future p