it more variable. A
woman's reason should be less rigid; and I should loathe mine if it were
not a leaven of indulgence and forgiveness in my life....

"Oh, Rose, Rose, tell me that the coldness of your soul springs from its
wonderful purity! Tell me that your heart is so deep that the sound of
the joys which fall into it cannot be heard outside! Tell me that it is
the storm of your life that has crushed the flowers of your sensibility
for the time....

"I well know that our interest cannot always be active, that it must be
suppressed; I know that indifference is essential to the happy
equilibrium of our faculties and that, beside the exaltation of our
soul, it is the untroubled lake fertilising and refreshing the earth.
And you will find, Rose, how necessary it is to be on our guard against
it in our judgments and how it can take possession of some natures and
slowly destroy them under a hateful appearance of wisdom! I would rather
discover ugly and active defects in you than that beautiful
impassiveness. Besides, as I have told you many a time, the excellence
that seems to me ideal has its weaknesses. It is rather a way of
perfection for our poor humanity, a way that is all the better because
it is adapted for our feeble and wavering steps!...

"Once, at harvest-time, I met you in the little road near the church. It
was the end of the day; and you were coming back from the fields. You
were standing high on a swaying mountain of hay, you were driving a
great farm-horse, which disappeared under its load. Your tall figure
stood out against the sky ablaze with the last rays of the sun; and I
still see your look of absolute unconcern. You wore a long blue apron
that came all round you and a bodice of the same colour. In that blue
faded by the sun, with your hair a pale cloud in the gold of the
sunset, you looked like an archangel taken from some Italian fresco.

"As you passed me, you timidly returned my smile; and I followed you for
a long time with my eyes. Do you still remember the trouble you had in
passing under the dark vault of the old oaks? Every now and again, a
branch, longer and lower than the others, threatened your face: you
caught it with a quick movement and lifted it over your head. At one
time, there were so many of those branches and they were so heavy that
you were obliged to lie back on the hay, holding both arms over your
face to save it from being struck. Then, when the lumbering wagon
stopped in