while the
night dews covered the earth with a faint haze.

"I am surprised that, when you were so unhappy, solitude did not appear
to you in the light of a beautiful dream."

Rose's timid and astonished voice echoed my last words:

"A beautiful dream! Then do you like solitude?"

"Oh, Rose, I owe it the greatest, the only joys of my childhood! It was
to gain solitude that, later, I set myself to win my independence,
knowing that, if I did not meet with the love I wished, I should yet be
happier alone than among others."

"But, still, you do not live alone!"

I remained silent for a moment, stirred by that question which filled my
mind with the thought of my own happiness; and then I said in a whisper,
as though speaking to myself:

"Rose, my present life is the most exquisite form of independence and
solitude."

And I went on:

"Ah, Rose, to know how to be alone! That is the finest conquest that a
woman can make! You cannot imagine my rapture when I first found myself
in a home of my own, surrounded by all the things purchased by my work.
When I came in at the end of the day, my heart used to throb with
gladness. No pleasure has ever seemed to equal that blessed harmony
which reigned and reigns in my soul or that assured peace which no one
can take from me, because it depends only on my mood."

"Teach me that joy."

"It is only a brighter light of our own consciousness, a more detached
and loftier contemplation of what affects us, a truer way of seeing and
understanding...."

The girl murmured:

"Shall I ever have it?"

"Later, when you have gone away."

And, in response to her anxious sigh, I went on, confidently:

"And you will go away when you want to go as badly as I did, when your
object is not so much to escape unhappiness as to secure happiness; for,
when you become what I hope to see you, you will look at things so
differently! You will pity those about you, you will not judge them. The
irksome duties laid upon you will not be a burden to you. You will
understand the beauty of the country for the first time; and the thought
of leaving it will reveal its sweetness to you. But, on the other hand,
fortunately, new reasons for going will appeal to your conscience:
first, your just pride in what you are and what you may become; the
sense of your independence; and the vision of a wider and nobler
existence. And, in this way, you will go not to escape annoyance or to
please me, but as a duty towa