ion for her, and she had enwrapt him in an unbridled and
fatiguing passion, persecuting him with her affection. She insisted on
seeing him every day, summoning him at all hours to a hasty meeting at a
street corner, at a shop, or in a public garden. She would then repeat
to him in a few words, always the same, that she worshiped and idolized
him, and leave him, vowing that she felt so happy to have seen him. She
showed herself quite another creature than he had fancied her, striving
to charm him with puerile glances, a childishness in love affairs
ridiculous at her age. Having remained up till then strictly honest,
virgin in heart, inaccessible to all sentiment, ignorant of sensuality,
a strange outburst of youthful tenderness, of ardent, naive and tardy
love, made up of unlooked-for outbursts, exclamations of a girl of
sixteen, graces grown old without ever having been young, had taken
place in this staid woman. She wrote him ten letters a day, maddeningly
foolish letters, couched in a style at once poetic and ridiculous, full
of the pet names of birds and beasts.

As soon as they found themselves alone together she would kiss him with
the awkward prettiness of a great tomboy, pouting of the lips that were
grotesque, and bounds that made her too full bosom shake beneath her
bodice. He was above all, sickened with hearing her say, "My pet," "My
doggie," "My jewel," "My birdie," "My treasure," "My own," "My
precious," and to see her offer herself to him every time with a little
comedy of infantile modesty, little movements of alarm that she thought
pretty, and the tricks of a depraved schoolgirl. She would ask, "Whose
mouth is this?" and when he did not reply "Mine," would persist till she
made him grow pale with nervous irritability. She ought to have felt, it
seemed to him, that in love extreme tact, skill, prudence, and exactness
are requisite; that having given herself to him, she, a woman of mature
years, the mother of a family, and holding a position in society, should
yield herself gravely, with a kind of restrained eagerness, with tears,
perhaps, but with those of Dido, not of Juliet.

She kept incessantly repeating to him, "How I love you, my little pet.
Do you love me as well, baby?"

He could no longer bear to be called "my little pet," or "baby," without
an inclination to call her "old girl."

She would say to him, "What madness of me to yield to you. But I do not
regret it. It is so sweet to love."

All