“Does he succeed?”

“Yes.  Honorine goes back to her husband, but it cost her her life.  She cannot live with a man she doesn’t love.  That is the point of the story.”

“I wonder why that should remind you of me?”

“There is something delicate, rare, and mystical about you both.  But I can’t say I place Honorine very high among Balzac’s works.  There are beautiful touches in it, but I think he failed to realise the type.  You are more virile, more real to me than Honorine.  No; on the whole, Balzac has not done you.  He perceived you dimly.  If he had lived it might, it certainly would, have been otherwise.  There is, of course, the Duchesse Langeais.  There is something of you in her; but she is no more than a brilliant sketch, no better than Honorine.  There is Eugene Grandet.  But no; Balzac never painted your portrait.”

Like all good talkers, he knew how to delude his listeners into the belief that they were taking an important part in the conversation.  He allowed them to speak, he solicited their opinions, and listened as if they awakened the keenest interest in him; he developed what they had vaguely suggested.  He paused before their remarks, he tempted his listener into personal appreciations and sudden revelations of character.  He addressed an intimate vanity and became the inspiration of every choice, and in a mysterious reticulation of emotions, tastes and ideas, life itself seemed to converge to his ultimate authority.  And having induced recognition of the wisdom of his wishes, he knew how to make his yoke agreeable to bear; it never galled the back that bore it, it lay upon it soft as a silken gown.  Evelyn enjoyed the gentle imposition of his will.  Obedience became a delight, and in its intellectual sloth life floated as in an opium dream without end, dissolving as the sunset dissolves in various modulations.  Obedience is a divine sensualism; it is the sensualism of the saints; its lassitudes are animated with deep pauses and thrills of love and worship.  We lift our eyes, and a great joy fills our hearts, and we sink away into blisses of remote consciousness.  The delights of obedience are the highest felicities of love, and these Evelyn had begun to experience.  She had ascended already into this happy nowhere.  She was aware of him, and a little of the brilliant goal whither he was leading her.  She was the instrument, he was the hand that played upon it, and all that had happened from hour to hour in their mutual existence revealed in some new and unexpected way his mastery over life.  She had seen great ladies bowing to him, smiling upon him in a way that told their intention to get him away from her.  She had heard scraps of his conversation with the French and English noblemen who had stopped to speak to him; and now, as Owen was getting into the victoria, after a brief visit to some great lady who had sent her footman to fetch him, a man, who looked to Evelyn like a sort of superior groom, came breathless to their carriage.  He had only just heard that Owen was on the course.  He was the great English trainer from Chantilly, and had tried Armide II. to win with a stone more on his back than he had to carry.