without tempests, like a limpid stream, and will send you to sleep.  Every evening you can if you like satisfy your passion for sermons by digesting one with your dinner.  English morality, I do assure you, is as superior to that of Touraine as our cutlery, our plate, and our horses are to your knives and your turf.  Do me the kindness to listen to my vicar; promise me.  I am only a woman, my dearest; I can love, I can die for you if you will; but I have never studied at Eton, or at Oxford, or in Edinburgh.  I am neither a doctor of laws nor a reverend; I can’t preach morality; in fact, I am altogether unfit for it, I should be awkward if I tried.  I don’t blame your tastes; you might have others more depraved, and I should still endeavor to conform to them, for I want you to find near me all you like best,—­pleasures of love, pleasures of food, pleasures of piety, good claret, and virtuous Christians.  Shall I wear hair-cloth to-night?  She is very lucky, that woman, to suit you in morality.  From what college did she graduate?  Poor I, who can only give you myself, who can only be your slave—­”

“Then why did you rush away when I wanted to bring you together?”

“Are you crazy, Amedee?  I could go from Paris to Rome disguised as a valet; I would do the most unreasonable thing for your sake; but how can you expect me to speak to a woman on the public roads who has never been presented to me,—­and who, besides, would have preached me a sermon under three heads?  I speak to peasants, and if I am hungry I would ask a workman to share his bread with me and pay him in guineas, —­that is all proper enough; but to stop a carriage on the highway, like the gentlemen of the road in England, is not at all within my code of manners.  You poor child, you know only how to love; you don’t know how to live.  Besides, I am not like you as yet, dear angel; I don’t like morality.  Still, I am capable of great efforts to please you.  Yes, I will go to work; I will learn how to preach; you shall have no more kisses without verses of the Bible interlarded.”

She used her power and abused it as soon as she saw in my eyes the ardent expression which was always there when she began her sorceries.  She triumphed over everything, and I complacently told myself that the woman who loses all, sacrifices the future, and makes love her only virtue, is far above Catholic polemics.

“So she loves herself better than she loves you?” Arabella went on.  “She sets something that is not you above you.  Is that love? how can we women find anything to value in ourselves except that which you value in us?  No woman, no matter how fine a moralist she may be, is the equal of a man.  Tread upon us, kill us; never embarrass your lives on our account.  It is for us to die, for you to live, great and honored.  For us the dagger in your hand; for you our pardoning love.  Does the sun think of the gnats in his beams, that live by his light? they stay as long as they can and when he withdraws his face they die—­”