ns are proud
Nobody troubled himself about that originality
One who first thought of pasting a canvas on a panel
Simple people who doubt neither themselves nor others
Superior men sometimes lack cleverness
The door of one's room opens on the infinite
The one whom you will love and who will love you will harm you
The past is the only human reality--Everything that is, is past
There are many grand and strong things which you do not feel
They are the coffin saying: 'I am the cradle'
To be beautiful, must a woman have that thin form
Trying to make Therese admire what she did not know
Unfortunate creature who is the plaything of life
What will be the use of having tormented ourselves in this world
Women do not always confess it, but it is always their fault
You must take me with my own soul!

THE RED LILY

By ANATOLE FRANCE

BOOK 3.

CHAPTER XXIII

"ONE IS NEVER KIND WHEN ONE IS IN LOVE"

The next day, in the hidden pavilion of the Via Alfieri, she found him
preoccupied. She tried to distract him with ardent gayety, with the
sweetness of pressing intimacy, with superb humility. But he remained
sombre. He had all night meditated, labored over, and recognized his
sadness. He had found reasons for suffering. His thought had brought
together the hand that dropped a letter in the post-box before the bronze
San Marco and the dreadful unknown who had been seen at the station. Now
Jacques Dechartre gave a face and a name to the cause of his suffering.
In the grandmother's armchair where Therese had been seated on the day of
her welcome, and which she had this time offered to him, he was assailed
by painful images; while she, bent over one of his arms, enveloped him
with her warm embrace and her loving heart. She divined too well what he
was suffering to ask it of him simply.

In order to bring him back to pleasanter ideas, she recalled the secrets
of the room where they were and reminiscences of their walks through the
city. She was gracefully familiar.

"The little spoon you gave me, the little red lily spoon, I use for my
tea in the morning. And I know by the pleasure I feel at seeing it when I
wake how much I love you."

Then, as he replied only in sentences sad and evasive, she said:

"I am near you, but you do not care for me. You are preoccupied by some
idea that I do not fathom. Yet I am alive, and an idea is nothing."