onment, in an atmosphere of truthfulness and affection.
This had always been an idea of his. It was an old theory of his
which he would have liked to test on a large scale: culture through
environment, complete regeneration even, the improvement, the salvation
of the individual, physically as well as morally. She owed to him
undoubtedly the best part of her nature; she guessed how fanciful and
violent she might have become, while he had made her only enthusiastic
and courageous.

In this retrospection she was clearly conscious of the gradual change
that had taken place within her. Pascal had corrected her heredity,
and she lived over again the slow evolution, the struggle between the
fantastic and the real in her. It had begun with her outbursts of anger
as a child, a ferment of rebellion, a want of mental balance that had
caused her to indulge in most hurtful reveries. Then came her fits
of extreme devotion, the need of illusion and falsehood, of immediate
happiness in the thought that the inequalities and injustices of this
wicked world would he compensated by the eternal joys of a future
paradise. This was the epoch of her struggles with Pascal, of the
torture which she had caused him, planning to destroy the work of his
genius. And at this point her nature had changed; she had acknowledged
him for her master. He had conquered her by the terrible lesson of life
which he had given her on the night of the storm. Then, environment had
acted upon her, evolution had proceeded rapidly, and she had ended by
becoming a well-balanced and rational woman, willing to live life as it
ought to be lived, satisfied with doing her work in the hope that the
sum of the common labor would one day free the world from evil and pain.
She had loved, she was a mother now, and she understood.

Suddenly she remembered the night which they had spent in the threshing
yard. She could still hear her lamentation under the stars--the cruelty
of nature, the inefficacy of science, the wickedness of humanity, and
the need she felt of losing herself in God, in the Unknown. Happiness
consisted in self-renunciation. Then she heard him repeat his creed--the
progress of reason through science, truths acquired slowly and forever
the only possible good, the belief that the sum of these truths, always
augmenting, would finally confer upon man incalculable power and peace,
if not happiness. All was summed up in his ardent faith in life. As he
expressed it, it