by that word of loving-kindness. Were they not all, these
bestowers of joy, living in a world into which neither sin nor error
entered, their lives obeying the same eternal principles of love,
following the sacred law of nature which fills our hearts with
tenderness and our bodies with longing?

6

They were now able to talk together. Their remarks would not be vain,
ordinary or frivolous. During the first moments of isolation, each of
them had pursued her own thoughts and continued her own life. Each had
reached that perfect diapason at which the most antagonistic spirits are
in supreme unison. Heedless of different objects or of diverse aims, the
same yearning for generosity, the same thirst after graciousness and
beauty united their hearts; and their minds, leaping all barriers, came
to an understanding of one another in a region beyond opinions. All
these young and beautiful creatures, all these forms fashioned for
delight exhaled an atmosphere of love. Were they not all alike its
votaries?

One alone, in a fiercer glow of enthusiasm and with a doubtless finer
sensualism, one alone attempts to offer up her life to a God! The
glorious folly of her! How I love to see her, vainly tormenting her
beauty, seeking infinity, aspiring to bear peace across the world. I see
her soul like a walled garden in which all the flowers lift themselves
higher and higher, struggling to offer themselves to a moment of light.
But, in a day of greater discontent and in an hour of maturity, the
illusory fence will fall and the fair life will stand in open space.
Then, drunk with boundless earth and boundless sky, the woman, restored
to nature, will doubtless find herself more attuned to pleasure than
were the others and more responsive to joy.

I looked at all those bowed heads, dark or fair, dusky or golden, those
lovely forms revealed by their clinging robes, those delicate profiles
bent over the portraits and writings of their sisters, far-off friends,
vanished, unknown or absent, whose power of love still lives for all men
and for all time ... immortal tears, petals dropped from the flower.

Then my glistening eyes turned towards my Roseline. She was there,
indifferent, unmoved, perhaps secretly bored.

And my thoughts wept in my heart.

The most beautiful things cannot be given.

CHAPTER X

1

I had been out of town for a time. Returning to Paris a day sooner than
I intended, I wished to give Rose the pleasure o