e takes it without thereby
incurring any responsibility, and with the power to disavow or retract
it whenever she desires to do so. According to my father, it is the
woman who first declares her passion through the medium of furtive
glances that, later, she disavows to her own conscience if necessary,
and of which he to whom they are directed divines, rather than reads,
the significance. In this manner, by a species of electric shock, by
means of a subtle and inexplicable intuition, he who is loved perceives
that he is loved; and when at last he makes up his mind to declare
himself, he can do so confidently, and in the full security that his
passion is returned.

Perhaps it is these theories of my father, to which I have listened
because I could not help it, that have heated my fancy and made me
imagine what has no existence in reality.

Yet, after all, I say to myself at times, Is the thought so absurd, so
incredible, that this illusion should have an existence in reality? And
if it had, if I were pleasing in Pepita's eyes otherwise than as a
friend, if the woman to whom my father is paying his addresses should
fall in love with me, would not my position then be terrible?

But let us cast away these fears, the creation, no doubt, of vanity. Let
us not make of Pepita a Phaedra, or of me a Hippolytus.

What in reality begins to surprise me is my father's carelessness and
complete consciousness of security. Pardon my pride, ask Heaven to
pardon it; for at times this consciousness of security piques and
offends me. What! I say to myself, is there something so absurd in the
thought that it should not even occur to my father that, notwithstanding
my supposed sanctity, or perhaps because of my supposed sanctity, I
should, without wishing it, inspire Pepita with love?

There is an ingenious method of reasoning by which I explain to myself,
without wounding my vanity, my father's carelessness in this important
particular. My father, although he has no reason for doing so, begins to
regard himself already in the light of Pepita's husband, and to share in
that fatal blindness with which Asmodeus, or some other yet more
malicious demon, afflicts husbands. Profane and ecclesiastical history
is fall of instances of this blindness, which God permits, no doubt, for
providential purposes. The most remarkable example of it, perhaps, is
that of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who had for wife a woman so vile as
Faustina, and yet so wis