body; Madame de Mortsauf was the wife of the soul.  The love which the mistress satisfies has its limits; matter is finite, its inherent qualities have an ascertained force, it is capable of saturation; often I felt a void even in Paris, near Lady Dudley.  Infinitude is the region of the heart, love had no limits at Clochegourde.  I loved Lady Dudley passionately; and certainly, though the animal in her was magnificent, she was also superior in mind; her sparkling and satirical conversation had a wide range.  But I adored Henriette.  At night I wept with happiness, in the morning with remorse.

Some women have the art to hide their jealousy under a tone of angelic kindness; they are, like Lady Dudley, over thirty years of age.  Such women know how to feel and how to calculate; they press out the juices of to-day and think of the future also; they can stifle a moan, often a natural one, with the will of a huntsman who pays no heed to a wound in the ardor of the chase.  Without ever speaking of Madame de Mortsauf, Arabella endeavored to kill her in my soul, where she ever found her, her own passion increasing with the consciousness of that invincible love.  Intending to triumph by comparisons which would turn to her advantage, she was never suspicious, or complaining, or inquisitive, as are most young women; but, like a lioness who has seized her prey and carries it to her lair to devour, she watched that nothing should disturb her feast, and guarded me like a rebellious captive.  I wrote to Henriette under her very eyes, but she never read a line of my letters; she never sought in any way to know to whom they were addressed.  I had my liberty; she seemed to say to herself, “If I lose him it shall be my own fault,” and she proudly relied on a love that would have given me her life had I asked for it,—­in fact she often told me that if I left her she would kill herself.  I have heard her praise the custom of Indian widows who burn themselves upon their husband’s grave.  “In India that is a distinction reserved for the higher classes,” she said, “and is very little understood by Europeans, who are incapable of understanding the grandeur of the privilege; you must admit, however, that on the dead level of our modern customs aristocracy can rise to greatness only through unparalleled devotions.  How can I prove to the middle classes that the blood in my veins is not the same as theirs, unless I show them that I can die as they cannot?  Women of no birth can have diamonds and satins and horses—­even coats-of-arms, which ought to be sacred to us, for any one can buy a name.  But to love, with our heads up, in defiance of law; to die for the idol we have chosen, with the sheets of our bed for a shroud; to lay earth and heaven at his feet, robbing the Almighty of his right to make a god, and never to betray that man, never, never, even for virtue’s sake,—­for, to refuse him anything in the name of duty is to devote ourselves to something that is not he, and let that something be a man or an idea, it is betrayal all the same,—­these are heights to which common women cannot attain; they know but two matter-of-fact ways; the great high-road of virtue, or the muddy path of the courtesan.”