how I felt as a frightened, trembling and enraptured little
girl.... A sailor was singing some way off; and the gulls that circled
between sea and sky seemed to be keeping the last rays of daylight upon
their white wings.

Why, I know that boy's mouth by heart and shall always know it! We often
kissed again, without even dreaming that, at this game as at all games,
there might be room for progress!... And then ... and then ... that's
all I remember of him.... The next is another memory, at another place
and another age.... And then another again....

2

Would one not think that, in the more or less happy lives of us women,
in our more or less easily traversed roads, the sensations of love are
so many illuminated floral arches that mark the different stages of our
accomplishment? We go up to them, we pass through them with hopes,
smiles or sighs. But, whatever they may be, we come out of them fairer
and better. What should we be without that, without love? The love which
is rebuked, which we are supposed to hide and blush for! The love that
entreats both our strength and our weakness, our patience and our
fervour, our passion and our reason! The love that sets in motion our
highest faculties and our lowest instincts, that makes each of us know
her own power and her own poverty by the part which she allows it to
play in her life!

In that moment, I saw and lived my joys in the kisses of childhood and
girlhood. I travelled my road again; and the arches of light seemed
higher to me and they followed hard on one another, becoming ever more
radiant and decked with gayer flowers, until this very hour when the
desired happiness has been found, established and kept fast....

3

My thoughts return to Rose, who has sat down under a tree; and I stretch
myself beside her.

A herd of cows suddenly enters the orchard. White and brown, they plunge
among the apple-trees; driven by a child, who is taking them down to the
long grass, they amble heavily along in meek-eyed resignation. A smell
of cow-shed at once reaches our nostrils; and, in the silence, we hear a
noise of busy munching....

"Darling, you, who have always lived in the midst of nature, should have
sounder and more accurate ideas on love than those of other women, while
mine are a little warped by my over-cultivated nerves and feelings. If,
for instance, you had said to me, yesterday, 'I gave myself because it
was natural,' you would have dominated my poor reas