es ever to belong wholly
to you; they are too much under the influence of society ever to let you
reign supreme. Where a Frenchwoman comforts by a look, or betrays her
impatience with visitors by witty jests, an Englishwoman's silence is
absolute; it irritates the soul and frets the mind. These women are so
constantly, and, under all circumstances, on their dignity, that to
most of them fashion reigns omnipotent even over their pleasures. An
Englishwoman forces everything into form; though in her case the love of
form does not produce the sentiment of art. No matter what may be said
against it, Protestantism and Catholicism explain the differences
which make the love of Frenchwomen so far superior to the calculating,
reasoning love of Englishwomen. Protestantism doubts, searches, and
kills belief; it is the death of art and love. Where worldliness is all
in all, worldly people must needs obey; but passionate hearts flee from
it; to them its laws are insupportable.

You can now understand what a shock my self-love received when I found
that Lady Dudley could not live without the world, and that the English
system of two lives was familiar to her. It was no sacrifice she felt
called upon to make; on the contrary she fell naturally into two forms
of life that were inimical to each other. When she loved she loved
madly,--no woman of any country could be compared to her; but when the
curtain fell upon that fairy scene she banished even the memory of
it. In public she never answered to a look or a smile; she was neither
mistress nor slave; she was like an ambassadress, obliged to round her
phrases and her elbows; she irritated me by her composure, and outraged
my heart with her decorum. Thus she degraded love to a mere need,
instead of raising it to an ideal through enthusiasm. She expressed
neither fear, nor regrets, nor desire; but at a given hour her
tenderness reappeared like a fire suddenly lighted.

In which of these two women ought I to believe? I felt, as it were by
a thousand pin-pricks, the infinite differences between Henriette and
Arabella. When Madame de Mortsauf left me for a while she seemed to
leave to the air the duty of reminding me of her; the folds of her gown
as she went away spoke to the eye, as their undulating sound to the ear
when she returned; infinite tenderness was in the way she lowered her
eyelids and looked on the ground; her voice, that musical voice, was a
continual caress; her words expresse