ssion, but with
that idyllic frankness with which Chloe spoke to Daphnis, and with the
humility and the complete self-abandonment with which the
daughter-in-law of Naomi offered herself to Boaz.

"Do you then persist in your purpose?" she asked. "Are you sure of your
vocation? Are you not afraid of being a bad priest? Don Luis, I am going
to make a supreme effort. I am going to forget that I am an uncultured
girl; I am going to dispense with all sentiment, and to reason as coldly
as if it were concerning the matter most indifferent to me. Things have
taken place that may be explained in two ways; both explanations do you
discredit. I will show you what my thoughts are. If the woman who, with
her coquetries--not very daring ones, in truth--almost without a word,
and but a few days after seeing and speaking to you for the first time,
has been able to provoke you, to move you to look at her with glances
that betokened a profane love, and has even obtained from you a proof of
that love that would be a fault, a sin, in any one, but is so especially
in a priest--if this woman be, as she indeed is, a simple country-girl,
without education, without talent, and without elegance, what is not to
be feared of you when in great cities you see and converse with other
women a thousand times more dangerous? Your head will be turned when you
are thrown into the society of the great ladies who dwell in palaces,
who tread on soft carpets, who dazzle the eye with their diamonds and
pearls, who are clad in silks and laces instead of muslin and percale,
who leave bare the white and well-formed throat instead of covering it
with a plebeian and modest handkerchief, who are adepts in all the arts
of coquetry, and who, by reason of the very ostentation, luxury, and
pomp that surround them, are all the more desirable for being apparently
more inaccessible; who discuss politics, philosophy, religion, and
literature; who sing like canaries, who are enveloped, as it were, in
clouds of incense, adoration and homage, set upon a pedestal of triumphs
and of victories, glorified by the prestige of an illustrious name,
enthroned in gilded saloons, or secluded in voluptuous boudoirs, where
enter only the blest ones of the earth, its titled ones, perhaps, who
only to their most intimate friends are "Pepita," "Antonita," or
"Angelita," and to the rest of the world, "Her Grace the Duchess," or
"the Marchioness." If you have yielded to the arts of an uncultured