"'Every time my eyes met his I should see my sin in them, even when
his were full of love. The greatness of his generosity would be the
measure of the greatness of my crime. My eyes, always uneasy, would be
for ever reading an invisible condemnation. My heart would be full of
confused and struggling memories; marriage can never move me to the
cruel rapture, the mortal delirium of passion. I should kill my
husband by my coldness, by comparisons which he would guess, though
hidden in the depths of my conscience. Oh! on the day when I should
read a trace of involuntary, even of suppressed reproach in a furrow
on his brow, in a saddened look, in some imperceptible gesture,
nothing could hold me: I should be lying with a fractured skull on the
pavement, and find that less hard than my husband. It might be my own
over-susceptibility that would lead me to this horrible but welcome
death; I might die the victim of an impatient mood in Octave caused by
some matter of business, or be deceived by some unjust suspicion.
Alas! I might even mistake some proof of love for a sign of contempt!

"'What torture on both sides! Octave would be always doubting me, I
doubting him. I, quite involuntarily, should give him a rival wholly
unworthy of him, a man whom I despise, but with whom I have known
raptures branded on me with fire, which are my shame, but which I
cannot forget.

"'Have I shown you enough of my heart? No one, monsieur, can convince
me that love may be renewed, for I neither can nor will accept love
from any one. A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty
wife is like a flower that had been walked over. You, who are a
florist, you know whether it is ever possible to restore the broken
stem, to revive the faded colors, to make the sap flow again in the
tender vessels of which the whole vegetative function lies in their