“Does your father know of your project?”

It was his last resource to invoke the authority of Montessuy.  He knew that his wife feared to displease her father.  He insisted: 

“Your father is full of sense and tact.  I have been happy to find him agreeing with me several times in the advices which I have permitted myself to give you.  He thinks as I do, that Madame Meillan’s house is not a fit place for you to visit.  The company that meets there is mixed, and the mistress of the house favors intrigue.  You are wrong, I must say, not to take account of what people think.  I am mistaken if your father does not think it singular that you should go away with so much frivolity, and the absence will be the more remarked, my dear, since circumstances have made me eminent in the course of this legislature.  My merit has nothing to do with the case, surely.  But if you had consented to listen to me at dinner I should have demonstrated to you that the group of politicians to which I belong has almost reached power.  In such a moment you should not renounce your duties as mistress of the house.  You must understand this yourself.”

She replied “You annoy me.”  And, turning her back to him, she shut the door of her room between them.  That night in her bed she opened a book, as she always did before going to sleep.  It was a novel.  She was turning the leaves with indifference, when her eyes fell on these lines: 

“Love is like devotion:  it comes late.  A woman is hardly in love or devout at twenty, unless she has a special disposition to be either, a sort of native sanctity.  Women who are predestined to love, themselves struggle a long time against that grace of love which is more terrible than the thunderbolt that fell on the road to Damascus.  A woman oftenest yields to the passion of love only when age or solitude does not frighten her.  Passion is an arid and burning desert.  Passion is profane asceticism, as harsh as religious asceticism.  Great woman lovers are as rare as great penitent women.  Those who know life well know that women do not easily bind themselves in the chains of real love.  They know that nothing is less common than sacrifice among them.  And consider how much a worldly woman must sacrifice when she is in love—­liberty, quietness, the charming play of a free mind, coquetry, amusement, pleasure—­she loses everything.

“Coquetry is permissible.  One may conciliate that with all the exigencies of fashionable life.  Not so love.  Love is the least mundane of passions, the most anti-social, the most savage, the most barbarous.  So the world judges it more severely than mere gallantry or looseness of manners.  In one sense the world is right.  A woman in love betrays her nature and fails in her function, which is to be admired by all men, like a work of art.  A woman is a work of art, the most marvellous that man’s industry ever has produced.  A woman is a wonderful artifice, due to the concourse of all the arts mechanical and of all the arts liberal.  She is the work of everybody, she belongs to the world.”