Mademoiselle Leblanc calls him, a savage, a boor, and
anything else you like. There is nothing more shaggy, more prickly, more
cunning, more malicious than Bernard. He is an animal who scarcely knows
how to sign his name; he is a coarse brute who thinks he can break me in
like one of the jades of Varenne. But he makes a great mistake; I will
die rather than ever be his, unless he becomes civilized enough to
marry me. But one might as well expect a miracle. I try to improve him,
without daring to hope. However, whether he forces me to kill myself or
to turn nun, whether he remains as he is or becomes worse, it will be
none the less true that I love him. My dear abbe, you know that it must
be costing me something to make this confession; and, when my affection
for you brings me as a penitent to your feet and to your bosom, you
should not humiliate me by your expressions of surprise and your
exorcisms! Consider the matter now; examine, discuss, decide! Consider
the matter now; examine, discuss, decide! The evil is--I love him. The
symptoms are--I think of none but him, I see none but him; and I could
eat no dinner this evening because he had not come back. I find him
handsomer than any man in the world. When he says that he loves me, I
can see, I can feel that it is true; I feel displeased, and at the same
time delighted. M. de la Marche seems insipid and prim since I have
known Bernard. Bernard alone seems as proud, as passionate, as bold as
myself--and as weak as myself; for he cries like a child when I vex him,
and here I am crying, too, as I think of him.'"

"Dear abbe," I said, throwing myself on his neck, "let me embrace you
till I have crushed your life out for remembering all this."

"The abbe is drawing the long bow," said Edmee archly.

"What!" I exclaimed, pressing her hands as if I would break them. "You
have made me suffer for seven years, and now you repent a few words that
console me . . ."

"In any case do not regret the past," she said. "Ah, with you such as
you were in those days, we should have been ruined if I had not been
able to think and decide for both of us. Good God! what would have
become of us by now? You would have had far more to suffer from my
sternness and pride; for you would have offended me from the very first
day of our union, and I should have had to punish you by running away
or killing myself, or killing you--for we are given to killing in our
family; it is a natural habit. One thi