not in the
least "mulish obstinacy." That mulish obstinacy of which you jestingly
accused me is in a woman the result of confidence, of a vision of the
future. Though my husband, sublimely generous, may forget all, I
shall not forget. Does forgetfulness depend on our will? When a widow
re-marries, love makes a girl of her; she marries a man she loves. But I
cannot love the Count. It all lies in that, do not you see?

"'Every time my eyes met his I should see my sin in them, even when his
were full of love. The greatness of his generosity would be the measure
of the greatness of my crime. My eyes, always uneasy, would be for ever
reading an invisible condemnation. My heart would be full of confused
and struggling memories; marriage can never move me to the cruel
rapture, the mortal delirium of passion. I should kill my husband by
my coldness, by comparisons which he would guess, though hidden in the
depths of my conscience. Oh! on the day when I should read a trace of
involuntary, even of suppressed reproach in a furrow on his brow, in a
saddened look, in some imperceptible gesture, nothing could hold me: I
should be lying with a fractured skull on the pavement, and find that
less hard than my husband. It might be my own over-susceptibility that
would lead me to this horrible but welcome death; I might die the victim
of an impatient mood in Octave caused by some matter of business, or be
deceived by some unjust suspicion. Alas! I might even mistake some proof
of love for a sign of contempt!

"'What torture on both sides! Octave would be always doubting me, I
doubting him. I, quite involuntarily, should give him a rival wholly
unworthy of him, a man whom I despise, but with whom I have known
raptures branded on me with fire, which are my shame, but which I cannot
forget.

"'Have I shown you enough of my heart? No one, monsieur, can convince
me that love may be renewed, for I neither can nor will accept love from
any one. A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is
like a flower that had been walked over. You, who are a florist, you
know whether it is ever possible to restore the broken stem, to revive
the faded colors, to make the sap flow again in the tender vessels of
which the whole vegetative function lies in their perfect rigidity. If
some botanist should attempt the operation, could his genius smooth out
the folds of the bruised corolla? If he could remake a flower, he
would be God! God alone ca