ate
disposition, who have stepped over a wide distance quickly, who desire
each other ardently, and who, nevertheless, do not know each other. It
is impossible that at first there should not occur certain discordant
notes in the situation, which is embarrassing until the moment when two
souls find themselves in unison.

If desire gives a man boldness and disposes him to lay restraint aside,
the mistress, under pain of ceasing to be woman, however great may be
her love, is afraid of arriving at the end so promptly, and face to face
with the necessity of giving herself, which to many women is equivalent
to a fall into an abyss, at the bottom of which they know not what they
shall find. The involuntary coldness of the woman contrasts with her
confessed passion, and necessarily reacts upon the most passionate
lover. Thus ideas, which often float around souls like vapors, determine
in them a sort of temporary malady. In the sweet journey which two
beings undertake through the fair domains of love, this moment is like
a waste land to be traversed, a land without a tree, alternatively damp
and warm, full of scorching sand, traversed by marshes, which leads to
smiling groves clad with roses, where Love and his retinue of pleasures
disport themselves on carpets of soft verdure. Often the witty man
finds himself afflicted with a foolish laugh which is his only answer to
everything; his wit is, as it were, suffocated beneath the icy pressure
of his desires. It would not be impossible for two beings of equal
beauty, intelligence, and passion to utter at first nothing but the
most silly commonplaces, until chance, a word, the tremor of a certain
glance, the communication of a spark, should have brought them to the
happy transition which leads to that flowery way in which one does not
walk, but where one sways and at the same time does not lapse.

Such a state of mind is always in proportion with the violence of the
feeling. Two creatures who love one another weakly feel nothing similar.
The effect of this crisis can even be compared with that which is
produced by the glow of a clear sky. Nature, at the first view, appears
to be covered with a gauze veil, the azure of the firmament seems black,
the intensity of light is like darkness. With Henri, as with the Spanish
girl, there was an equal intensity of feeling; and that law of statics,
in virtue of which two identical forces cancel each other, might have
been true also in the moral