ins no longer in its place; it runs
through streets, fields, and woods, girdled with ivy, and crowned with
roses. It keeps running up hill and down dale; the country policeman
surprises it sometimes, amidst the corn, in Gaspar's arms kissing him
upon the mouth."

Paul Visire had recovered all his customary nonchalance. Eveline
remained stretched on the Divan of the Favourite in an attitude of
delicious astonishment.

The Reverend Father Douillard, an excellent moral theologian, and a man
who in the decadence of the Church has preserved his principles, was
very right to teach, in conformity with the doctrine of the Fathers,
that while a woman commits a great sin by giving herself for money, she
commits a much greater one by giving herself for nothing. For, in the
first case she acts to support her life, and that is sometimes not
merely excusable but pardonable, and even worthy of the Divine Grace,
for God forbids suicide, and is unwilling that his creatures should
destroy themselves. Besides, in giving herself in order to live, she
remains humble, and derives no pleasure from it a thing which diminishes
the sin. But a woman who gives herself for nothing sins with pleasure
and exults in her fault. The pride and delight with which she burdens
her crime increase its load of moral guilt.

Madame Hippolyte Ceres' example shows the profundity of these moral
truths. She perceived that she had senses. A second was enough to bring
about this discovery, to change her soul, to alter her whole life. To
have learned to know herself was at first a delight. The {greek here}
of the ancient philosophy is not a precept the moral fulfilment of which
procures any pleasure, since one enjoys little satisfaction from knowing
one's soul. It is not the same with the flesh, for in it sources of
pleasure may be revealed to us. Eveline immediately felt an obligation
to her revealer equal to the benefit she had received, and she imagined
that he who had discovered these heavenly depths was the sole possessor
of the key to them. Was this an error, and might she not be able to
find others who also had the golden key? It is difficult to decide; and
Professor Haddock, when the facts were divulged (which happened without
much delay as we shall see), treated the matter from an experimental
point of view, in a scientific review, and concluded that the chances
Madame C-- would have of finding the exact equivalent of M. V-- were
in the proportion of 305 t