It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations.  He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.  In a single letter Henarez has outstripped volumes from Lovelace or Saint-Preux.  Here is true love, no beating about the bush.  Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Here am I, shorn of all my little arts!  To refuse or accept!  That is the alternative boldly presented me, without the ghost of an opening for a middle course.  No fencing allowed!  This is no longer Paris; we are in the heart of Spain or the far East.  It is the voice of Abencerrage, and it is the scimitar, the horse, and the head of Abencerrage which he offers, prostrate before a Catholic Eve!  Shall I accept this last descendant of the Moors?  Read again and again his Hispano-Saracenic letter, Renee dear, and you will see how love makes a clean sweep of all the Judaic bargains of your philosophy.

Renee, your letter lies heavy on my heart; you have vulgarized life for me.  What need have I for finessing?  Am I not mistress for all time of this lion whose roar dies out in plaintive and adoring sighs?  Ah! how he must have raged in his lair of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin!  I know where he lives, I have his card:  F., Baron de Macumer.

He has made it impossible for me to reply.  All I can do is to fling two camellias in his face.  What fiendish arts does love possess—­pure, honest, simple-minded love!  Here is the most tremendous crisis of a woman’s heart resolved into an easy, simple action.  Oh, Asia!  I have read the Arabian Nights, here is their very essence:  two flowers, and the question is settled.  We clear the fourteen volumes of Clarissa Harlowe with a bouquet.  I writhe before this letter, like a thread in the fire.  To take, or not to take, my two camellias.  Yes or No, kill or give life!  At last a voice cries to me, “Test him!” And I will test him.

XVI

THE SAME TO THE SAME
March.

I am dressed in white—­white camellias in my hair, and another in my hand.  My mother has red camellias; so it would not be impossible to take one from her—­if I wished!  I have a strange longing to put off the decision to the last moment, and make him pay for his red camellia by a little suspense.

What a vision of beauty!  Griffith begged me to stop for a little and be admired.  The solemn crisis of the evening and the drama of my secret reply have given me a color; on each cheek I sport a red camellia laid upon a white!

1 A. M.

Everybody admired me, but only one adored.  He hung his head as I entered with a white camellia, but turned pale as the flower when, later, I took a red one from my mother’s hand.  To arrive with the two flowers might possibly have been accidental; but this deliberate action was a reply.  My confession, therefore, is fuller than it need have been.