e to receive Adolphe any more: and she thereupon breaks
the ten years old union, and leaves her children and home.

Her young lover receives this riveting of his chains with consternation,
but he does his best. He defends her in public, he fights with a man who
speaks lightly of her, but this is not what she wants.

Of course I ought to have consoled her. I ought to have
pressed her to my heart and said, "Let us live for each
other; let us forget the misjudgments of men; let us be
happy in our mutual regard and our mutual love." I tried to
do so, but what can a resolution made out of duty do to
revive a sentiment that is extinct? Ellenore and I each
concealed something from the other. She dared not tell me
her troubles, arising from a sacrifice which she knew I had
not asked of her. I had accepted that sacrifice; I dared not
complain of ills which I had foreseen, and which I had not
had courage enough to forestall. We were therefore silent on
the very subject which occupied us both incessantly. We were
prodigal of caresses, we babbled of love, but when we spoke
of it we spoke for fear of speaking of something else.

Here is the full Nemesis of the sentiment that, to use Constant's own
words, is "neither passion nor duty," and has the strength of neither,
when it finds itself in presence of a stronger than itself. There were
none of these unpleasant meetings in Sensibility proper. There sentiment
met sentiment, and "exchanged itself," in Chamfort's famous phrase. When
the rate of exchange became unsatisfactory it sought some other
customer--a facile and agreeable process, which was quite consistent in
practice with all the sighs and flames. Adolphe is not to be quit so
easily of his conquest. He is recalled by his father, and his
correspondence with Ellenore is described in one of the astonishingly
true passages which make the book so remarkable.

During my absence I wrote regularly to Ellenore. I was
divided between the desire of not hurting her feelings and
the desire of truthfully representing my own. I should have
liked her to guess what I felt, but to guess it without
being hurt by it. I felt a certain satisfaction when I had
substituted the words "affection," "friendship," "devotion,"
for the word "love." Then suddenly I saw poor Ellenore
sitting sad and solitary, with nothing but my letters for
c