Yesterday at Mme. d’Espard’s you had a self-satisfied air which disgusted me.  No doubt, apparently, about your conquest!  In sober earnest, your self-possession alarms me.  Not a trace in you of the humble slave of your first letter.  Far from betraying the absent-mindedness of a lover, you polished epigrams!  This is not the attitude of a true believer, always prostrate before his divinity.

If you do not feel me to be the very breath of your life, a being nobler than other women, and to be judged by other standards, then I must be less than a woman in your sight.  You have roused in me a spirit of mistrust, Felipe, and its angry mutterings have drowned the accents of tenderness.  When I look back upon what has passed between us, I feel in truth that I have a right to be suspicious.  For know, Prime Minister of all the Spains, that I have reflected much on the defenceless condition of our sex.  My innocence has held a torch, and my fingers are not burnt.  Let me repeat to you, then, what my youthful experience taught me.

In all other matters, duplicity, faithlessness, and broken pledges are brought to book and punished; but not so with love, which is at once the victim, the accuser, the counsel, judge, and executioner.  The cruelest treachery, the most heartless crimes, are those which remain for ever concealed, with two hearts alone for witness.  How indeed should the victim proclaim them without injury to herself?  Love, therefore, has its own code, its own penal system, with which the world has no concern.

Now, for my part, I have resolved never to pardon a serious misdemeanor, and in love, pray, what is not serious?  Yesterday you had all the air of a man successful in his suit.  You would be wrong to doubt it; and yet, if this assurance robbed you of the charming simplicity which sprang from uncertainty, I should blame you severely.  I would have you neither bashful nor self-complacent; I would not have you in terror of losing my affection—­that would be an insult—­but neither would I have you wear your love lightly as a thing of course.  Never should your heart be freer than mine.  If you know nothing of the torture that a single stab of doubt brings to the soul, tremble lest I give you a lesson!

In a single glance I confided my heart to you, and you read the meaning.  The purest feelings that ever took root in a young girl’s breast are yours.  The thought and meditation of which I have told you served only to enrich the mind; but if ever the wounded heart turns to the brain for counsel, be sure the young girl would show some kinship with the demon of knowledge and of daring.