A contract of this kind, directly opposed to the legal contract, and even to the sacrament itself, could be concluded only between Louis and me.  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.

“Louis,” I went on, as kindly as I could, “it rests entirely with you whether this marriage of convenience becomes one to which I can give my whole heart.  The favor I am about to ask from you will demand unselfishness on your part, far nobler than the servitude to which a man’s love, when sincere, is supposed to reduce him.  The question is, Can you rise to the height of friendship such as I understand it?