I do not know how to express in words all that I felt at that moment; my pen seems too clumsy to write my sensations, and, besides, did I really see deep into my heart?

Do men comprehend all this?  Do they understand that the heart requires gradual changes, and that if a half-light awakens, a noon-day blaze dazzles and burns?  It is not that the poor child, who is trembling in a corner, refuses to learn; far from that, she has aptitude, good-will, and a quick and ready intelligence; she knows she has reached the age at which it is necessary to know how to read; she rejects neither the science nor even the teacher.  It is the method of instruction that makes her uneasy.  She is afraid lest this young professor, whose knowledge is so extensive, should turn over the pages of the book too quickly and neglect the A B C.

A few hours back he was the submissive, humble lover, ready to kneel down before her, hiding his knowledge as one hides a sin, speaking his own language with a thousand circumspections.  At any moment it might have been thought that he was going to blush.  She was a queen, he a child; and now all at once the roles are changed; it is the submissive subject who arrives in the college cap of a professor, hiding under his arm an unknown and mysterious book.  Is the man in the college cap about to command, to smile, to obtrude himself and his books, to speak Latin, to deliver a lecture?

She does not know that this learned individual is trembling, too; that he is greatly embarrassed over his opening lesson, that emotion has caused him to forget his Latin, that his throat is parched and his legs are trembling beneath him.  She does not know this, and I tell you between ourselves, it is not her self-esteem that suffers least at this conjecture.  She suffers at finding herself, after so many signatures, contracts, and ceremonies-still a charming child, and nothing more.

I believe that the first step in conjugal life will, according to the circumstances accompanying it, give birth to captivating sympathies or invincible repulsion.  But to give birth to these sympathies, to strike the spark that is to set light to this explosion of infinite gratitude and joyful love—­what art, what tact, what delicacy, and at the same time what presence of mind are needed.

How was it that at the first word Georges uttered my terrors vanished?  His voice was so firm and so sweet, he asked me so gayly for leave to draw near the fire and warm his feet, and spoke to me with such ease and animation of the incidents of the day.  I said to myself, “It is impossible for the least baseness to be hidden under all this.”  In presence of so much good-humor and affability my scaffolding fell to pieces.  I ventured a look from beneath the sheets:  I saw him comfortably installed in the big armchair, and I bit my lips.  I am still at a loss to understand this little fit of ill-temper.  When one is reckoning on a fright, one is really disappointed at its delaying itself.  Never had Georges been more witty, more affectionate, more well-bred; he was still the man of the day before.  He must really have been very excited.