Josephine received Camille with a bright smile.She seemed in unusually good spirits, and overflowing with kindness and innocent affection.On this his high gloomy brow relaxed, and all his prospects brightened as by magic.Then she communicated to him a number of little plans for next week and the week after.Among the rest he was to go with her and Rose to Frejus."Such a sweet place:
I want to show it you.You will come?"
He hesitated a single moment: a moment of intense anxiety to the smiling Josephine.
"Yes! he would come: it was a great temptation, he saw so little of her.""Well, you will see more of me now."
"Shall I see you every day--alone, I mean?""Oh, yes, if you wish it," replied Josephine, in an off-hand, indifferent way.
He seized her hand and devoured it with kisses."Foolish thing!"murmured she, looking down on him with ineffable tenderness.
"Should I not be always with you if I consulted my inclination?--let me go.""No! consult your inclination a little longer.""Must I?"
"Yes; that shall be your punishment."
"For what? What have I done?" asked she with an air of great innocence.
"You have made me happy, me who adore you," was the evasive reply.
Josephine came in from her walk with a high color and beaming eyes, and screamed, "Run, Rose!"On this concise, and to us not very clear instruction, Rose slipped up the secret stair.She saw Camille come in and gravely unpack his little portmanteau, and dispose his things in the drawers with soldier-like neatness, and hum an agreeable march.She came and told Josephine.
"Ah!" said Josephine with a little sigh of pleasure, and a gentle triumph in her eyes.
She had not only got her desire, but had arrived at it her way,--woman's way, round about.
This adroit benevolence led to more than she bargained for.She and Camille were now together every day: and their hearts, being under restraint in public, melted together all the more in their stolen interviews.
At the third delicious interview the modest Camille begged Josephine to be his wife directly.
Have you noticed those half tame deer that come up to you in a park so lovingly, with great tender eyes, and, being now almost within reach, stop short, and with bodies fixed like statues on pedestals, crane out their graceful necks for sugar, or bread, or a chestnut, or a pocket-handkerchief? Do but offer to put your hand upon them, away they bound that moment twenty yards, and then stand quite still, and look at your hand and you, with great inquiring, suspicious, tender eyes.
So Josephine started at Camille's audacious proposal."Never mention such a thing to me again: or--or, I will not walk with you any more:" then she thrilled with pleasure at the obnoxious idea, "she Camille's wife!" and colored all over--with rage, Camille thought.He promised submissively not to renew the topic: no more he did till next day.Josephine had spent nearly the whole interval in thinking of it; so she was prepared to put him down by calm reasons.She proceeded to do so, gently, but firmly.
Lo and behold! what does he do, but meets her with just as many reasons, and just as calm ones: and urges them gently, but firmly.
Heaven had been very kind to them: why should they be unkind to themselves? They had had a great escape: why not accept the happiness, as, being persons of honor, they had accepted the misery?
with many other arguments, differing in other things, but agreeing in this, that they were all sober, grave, and full of common-sense.
Finding him not defenceless on the score of reason, she shifted her ground and appealed to his delicacy.On this he appealed to her love, and then calm reason was jostled off the field, and passion and sentiment battled in her place.
In these contests day by day renewed, Camille had many advantages.
Rose, though she did not like him, had now declared on his side.
She refused to show him the least attention.This threw him on Josephine: and when Josephine begged her to help reduce Camille to reason, her answer would be,--"Hypocrite!" with a kiss: or else she would say, with a half comic petulance, "No! no! I am on his side.Give him his own way, or he will make us all four miserable."Thus Josephine's ally went over to the enemy.
And then this coy young lady's very power of resistance began to give way.She had now battled for months against her own heart:
first for her mother; then, in a far more terrible conflict for Raynal, for honor and purity; and of late she had been battling, still against her own heart, for delicacy, for etiquette, things very dear to her, but not so great, holy, and sustaining as honor and charity that were her very household gods: and so, just when the motives of resistance were lowered, the length of the resistance began to wear her out.
For nothing is so hard to her *** as a long steady struggle.In matters physical, this is the thing the muscles of the fair cannot stand; in matters intellectual and moral, the long strain it is that beats them dead.
Do not look for a Bacona, a Newtona, a Handella, a Victoria Huga.
Some American ladies tell us education has stopped the growth of these.
No! mesdames.These are not in nature.
They can bubble letters in ten minutes that you could no more deliver to order in ten days than a river can play like a fountain.
They can sparkle gems of stories: they can flash little diamonds of poems.The entire *** has never produced one opera nor one epic that mankind could tolerate: and why? these come by long, high-strung labor.But, weak as they are in the long run of everything but the affections (and there giants), they are all overpowering while their gallop lasts.Fragilla shall dance any two of you flat on the floor before four o'clock, and then dance on till the peep of day.
Only you trundle off to your business as usual, and could dance again the next night, and so on through countless ages.
She who danced you into nothing is in bed, a human jelly tipped with headache.
What did Josephine say to Rose one day? "I am tired of saying 'No!
