speak,
coupled with the idea of assisting them in their becoming resignation,
of liking them for their reserve, and making it easier for them. I
quite felt my own intellectual superiority; but even at that early
age, I felt that the woman who is very beautiful or very good, solves
completely the problem of which we, with all our hard-headedness, make
such a hash. We are mere children or pedants compared to her. I as yet
understood this only vaguely, though I saw clearly enough that beauty
is so great a gift that talent, genius, and even virtue are nothing
when weighed in the balance with it; so that the woman who is really
beautiful has the right to hold herself superior to everybody and
everything, inasmuch as she combines not in a creation outside of
herself, but in her very person, as in a Myrrhine vase, all the
qualities which genius painfully endeavours to reproduce.

Among these, my companions, there was, as I have said, one to whom
I was particularly attached Her name was Noemi, and she was quite a
model of good conduct and grace. Her eyes had a languid look which
denoted at once good-nature and quickness; her hair was beautifully
fair. She was about two years my senior, and she treated me partly as
an elder sister, partly with the confidential affection of one child
for another. We got on very well together, and while our friends were
constantly falling out, we were always of one mind. I tried to make
these quarrels up, but she never thought that I should be successful,
and would tell me that it was hopeless to try and make everybody
agree. These attempts at mediation, which gave us an imperceptible
superiority over the other children, formed a very pleasing tie
between us. Even now I cannot hear "_Nous n'irons plus an bois_," or
"_Il pleut, il pleut, bergere_" without my heart beating rather more
quickly than is its wont. There can be no doubt that but for the fatal
vice which held me fast, I should have been in love with Noemi two or
three years later; but I was a slave to reasoning, and my whole time
was devoted to religious dialectics. The flow of abstractions which
rushed to the head made me giddy, and caused me to be absent-minded
and oblivious of all else.

This budding affection was, moreover, turned from its course by
a peculiar defect which, has more than once been injurious to my
prospects in life. This is my indecision of character, which often
leads me into positions from which I have great diffi