“Or fly somewhere else,” I said interrupting her.

“Yes, somewhere else,” she replied, with an indifference that would have piqued any man into using the power with which she invested him.  “Do you really think it is worthy of womanhood to make a man eat his bread buttered with virtue, and to persuade him that religion is incompatible with love?  Am I a reprobate?  A woman either gives herself or she refuses.  But to refuse and moralize is a double wrong, and is contrary to the rule of the right in all lands.  Here, you will get only excellent sandwiches prepared by the hand of your servant Arabella, whose sole morality is to imagine caresses no man has yet felt and which the angels inspire.”

I know nothing more destructive than the wit of an Englishwoman; she gives it the eloquent gravity, the tone of pompous conviction with which the British hide the absurdities of their life of prejudice.  French wit and humor, on the other hand, is like a lace with which our women adorn the joys they give and the quarrels they invent; it is a mental jewelry, as charming as their pretty dresses.  English wit is an acid which corrodes all those on whom it falls until it bares their bones, which it scrapes and polishes.  The tongue of a clever Englishwoman is like that of a tiger tearing the flesh from the bone when he is only in play.  All-powerful weapon of a sneering devil, English satire leaves a deadly poison in the wound it makes.  Arabella chose to show her power like the sultan who, to prove his dexterity, cut off the heads of unoffending beings with his own scimitar.

“My angel,” she said, “I can talk morality too if I choose.  I have asked myself whether I commit a crime in loving you; whether I violate the divine laws; and I find that my love for you is both natural and pious.  Why did God create some beings handsomer than others if not to show us that we ought to adore them?  The crime would be in not loving you.  This lady insults you by confounding you with other men; the laws of morality are not applicable to you; for God has created you above them.  Am I not drawing nearer to divine love in loving you? will God punish a poor woman for seeking the divine?  Your great and luminous heart so resembles the heavens that I am like the gnats which flutter about the torches of a fete and burn themselves; are they to be punished for their error? besides, is it an error? may it not be pure worship of the light?  They perish of too much piety,—­if you call it perishing to fling one’s self on the breast of him we love.  I have the weakness to love you, whereas that woman has the strength to remain in her Catholic shrine.  Now, don’t frown.  You think I wish her ill.  No, I do not.  I adore the morality which has led her to leave you free, and enables me to win you and hold you forever—­for you are mine forever, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Forever and ever?”

“Yes.”

“Ah!  I have found favor in my lord!  I alone have understood his worth!  She knows how to cultivate her estate, you say.  Well, I leave that to farmers; I cultivate your heart.”