Silence lasted rather a long time, but that unnatural felicity was imperfect, and increased my excitement.

“How canst thou complain,” she said tenderly, “when it is to that very imperfection of our enjoyment that we are indebted for its continuance?  I loved thee a few minutes since, now I love thee a thousand times more, and perhaps I should love thee less if thou hadst carried my enjoyment to its highest limit.”

“Oh! how much art thou mistaken, lovely one!  How great is thy error!  Thou art feeding upon sophisms, and thou leavest reality aside; I mean nature which alone can give real felicity.  Desires constantly renewed and never fully satisfied are more terrible than the torments of hell.”

“But are not these desires happiness when they are always accompanied by hope?”

“No, if that hope is always disappointed.  It becomes hell itself, because there is no hope, and hope must die when it is killed by constant deception.”

“Dearest, if hope does not exist in hell, desires cannot be found there either; for to imagine desires without hopes would be more than madness.”

“Well, answer me.  If you desire to be mine entirely, and if you feel the hope of it, which, according to your way of reasoning, is a natural consequence, why do you always raise an impediment to your own hope?  Cease, dearest, cease to deceive yourself by absurd sophisms.  Let us be as happy as it is in nature to be, and be quite certain that the reality of happiness will increase our love, and that love will find a new life in our very enjoyment.”

“What I see proves the contrary; you are alive with excitement now, but if your desires had been entirely satisfied, you would be dead, benumbed, motionless.  I know it by experience:  if you had breathed the full ecstacy of enjoyment, as you desired, you would have found a weak ardour only at long intervals.”

“Ah! charming creature, your experience is but very small; do not trust to it.  I see that you have never known love.  That which you call love’s grave is the sanctuary in which it receives life, the abode which makes it immortal.  Give way to my prayers, my lovely friend, and then you shall know the difference between Love and Hymen.  You shall see that, if Hymen likes to die in order to get rid of life, Love on the contrary expires only to spring up again into existence, and hastens to revive, so as to savour new enjoyment.  Let me undeceive you, and believe me when I say that the full gratification of desires can only increase a hundredfold the mutual ardour of two beings who adore each other.”

“Well, I must believe you; but let us wait.  In the meantime let us enjoy all the trifles, all the sweet preliminaries of love.  Devour thy mistress, dearest, but abandon to me all thy being.  If this night is too short we must console ourselves to-morrow by making arrangements for another one.”

“And if our intercourse should be discovered?”