This difficulty, the first which has arisen, is the only one
which has delayed the completion of our marriage. Although, at first,
I may have made up my mind to accept anything rather than return to
the convent, it is only in human nature, having got an inch, to ask
for an ell, and you and I, sweet love, are of those who would have it
all. I watched Louis out of the corner of my eye, and put it to myself,
"Has suffering had a softening or a hardening effect on him?" By dint
of close study, I arrived at the conclusion that his love amounted to
a passion.
Once transformed into an idol, whose slightest frown would
turn him white and trembling, I realized that I might venture
anything. I drew him aside in the most natural manner on solitary
walks, during which I discreetly sounded his feelings. I made him
talk, and got him to expound to me his ideas and plans for our future.
My questions betrayed so many preconceived notions, and went so
straight for the weak points in this terrible dual existence, that
Louis has since confessed to me the alarm it caused him to find in me
so little of the ignorant maiden.
Then I listened to what he had to say in reply. He got mixed up in his
arguments, as people do when handicapped by fear; and before long it
became clear that chance had given me for adversary one who was the
less fitted for the contest because he was conscious of what you
magniloquently call my "greatness of soul." Broken by sufferings and
misfortune, he looked on himself as a sort of wreck, and three fears
in especial haunted him.
First, we are aged respectively thirty-seven and seventeen; and he
could not contemplate without quaking the twenty years that divide us.
In the next place, he shares our views on the subject of my beauty,
and it is cruel for him to see how the hardships of his life have
robbed him of youth. Finally, he felt the superiority of my womanhood
over his manhood. The consciousness of these three obvious drawbacks
made him distrustful of himself; he doubted his power to make me
happy, and guessed that he had been chosen as the lesser of two evils.
One evening he tentatively suggested that I only married him to escape
the convent. "I cannot deny it," was my grave reply.
My dear, it touched me to the heart to see the two great tears which
stood in his eyes. Never before had I experienced the shock of emotion
which a man can impart to us.