Eve,--it was your part to estimate the effect of the answer.
You ought to have deceived me; later I should have thanked you. Is
it possible that you have never understood the special virtue of
lovers? Can you not feel how generous they are in swearing that
they have never loved before, and love at last for the first time?

No, your programme cannot be carried out. To attempt to be both
Madame de Mortsauf and Lady Dudley,--why, my dear friend, it would
be trying to unite fire and water within me! Is it possible that
you don't know women? Believe me, they are what they are, and they
have therefore the defects of their virtues. You met Lady Dudley
too early in life to appreciate her, and the harm you say of her
seems to me the revenge of your wounded vanity. You understood
Madame de Mortsauf too late; you punished one for not being the
other,--what would happen to me if I were neither the one nor the
other? I love you enough to have thought deeply about your future;
in fact, I really care for you a great deal. Your air of the
Knight of the Sad Countenance has always deeply interested me; I
believed in the constancy of melancholy men; but I little thought
that you had killed the loveliest and the most virtuous of women
at the opening of your life.

Well, I ask myself, what remains for you to do? I have thought it
over carefully. I think, my friend, that you will have to marry a
Mrs. Shandy, who will know nothing of love or of passion, and will
not trouble herself about Madame de Mortsauf or Lady Dudley; who
will be wholly indifferent to those moments of ennui which you
call melancholy, during which you are as lively as a rainy day,--a
wife who will be to you, in short, the excellent sister of charity
whom you are seeking. But as for loving, quivering at a word,
anticipating happiness, giving it, receiving it, experiencing all
the tempests of passion, cherishing the little weaknesses of a
beloved woman--my dear count, renounce it all! You have followed
the advice of your good angel about young women too closely; you
have avoided them so carefully that now you know nothing about
them. Madame de Mortsauf was right to place you high in life at
the start; otherwise all women would have been against you, and
you never would have risen in society.

It is too late now to begin your training over again; too late to
learn to tell us what we long to hear; to