ear of a dying agony had aroused a
horrible dread in her conscience; and remorse,--the remorse that she had
never been able to put down,--was now alive and crying aloud in her
enfeebled, broken body, as yet but partially restored to life, as yet
scarcely firm in the persuasion that it was alive.

Germinie's was not one of those fortunate natures that do wrong and
leave the memory of it behind them, and never feel a twinge of regret.
She had not, like Adele, one of those vulgar material organizations,
which never allow themselves to be affected by any but animal impulses.
She was not blessed with one of those consciences which escape suffering
by virtue of mere brutishness, or of that dense stupidity in which a
woman vegetates, sinning because she knows no better. In her case, an
unhealthy sensitiveness, a sort of cerebral excitement, a disposition on
the part of the brain to be always on the alert, to work itself into a
frenzy of bitterness, anxiety and discontent with itself, a moral sense
that stood erect, as it were, after every one of her backslidings, all
the characteristics of a sensitive mind, predestined to misfortune,
united to torture her, and to renew day after day, more openly and more
cruelly in her despair, the agony due to acts that would hardly have
caused such long-continued suffering in many women in her station.

Germinie yielded to the impulse of passion; but as soon as she had
yielded to it she despised herself. Even in the excitement of pleasure
she could not entirely forget and lose herself. The image of
mademoiselle always arose before her, with her stern, motherly face.
Germinie did not become immodest in the same degree that she abandoned
herself to her passions and sank lower and lower in vice. The degrading
depths to which she descended did not fortify her against her disgust
and horror of herself. Habit did not harden her. Her defiled conscience
rejected its defilement, struggled fiercely in its shame, rent itself in
its repentance and did not for one second permit itself the full
enjoyment of vice, was never completely stunned by its fall.

And so when mademoiselle, forgetting that she was a servant, leaned over
to her with the brusque familiarity of tone and gesture that went
straight to her heart, Germinie, confused and overcome with blushing
timidity, was speechless and seemed bereft of sense under the horrible
torture caused by the consciousness of her own unworthiness. She would
fly