y of many lives through you, and
hers cannot be less interesting than some of these."

Benassis stopped his horse as he answered. "Perhaps you will not share
in the feelings of interest awakened in me by La Fosseuse. Her fate
is like my own; we have both alike missed our vocation; it is the
similarity of our lots that occasions my sympathy for her and the
feelings that I experience at the sight of her. You either followed
your natural bent when you entered upon a military career, or you took
a liking for your calling after you had adopted it, otherwise you would
not have borne the heavy yoke of military discipline till now; you,
therefore, cannot understand the sorrows of a soul that must always feel
renewed within it the stir of longings that can never be realized; nor
the pining existence of a creature forced to live in an alien sphere.
Such sufferings as these are known only to these natures and to God who
sends their afflictions, for they alone can know how deeply the events
of life affect them. You yourself have seen the miseries produced by
long wars, till they have almost ceased to impress you, but have you
never detected a trace of sadness in your mind at the sight of a tree
bearing sere leaves in the midst of spring, some tree that is pining and
dying because it has been planted in soil in which it could not find the
sustenance required for its full development? Ever since my twentieth
year, there has been something painful and melancholy for me about the
drooping of a stunted plant, and now I cannot bear the sight and turn my
head away. My youthful sorrow was a vague presentiment of the sorrows of
my later life; it was a kind of sympathy between my present and a future
dimly foreshadowed by the life of the tree that before its time was
going the way of all trees and men."

"I thought that you had suffered when I saw how kind you were."

"You see, sir," the doctor went on without any reply to the remark made
by Genestas, "that to speak of La Fosseuse is to speak of myself. La
Fosseuse is a plant in an alien soil; a human plant moreover, consumed
by sad thoughts that have their source in the depths of her nature, and
that never cease to multiply. The poor girl is never well and strong.
The soul within her kills the body. This fragile creature was suffering
from the sorest of all troubles, a trouble which receives the least
possible sympathy from our selfish world, and how could I look on with
indifferent eyes?