Touches declined to receive Calyste, and would only see me. I
found her slightly changed, thinner and paler; but she seemed much
pleased at my visit.

"Tell Calyste," she said, in a low voice, "that it is a matter of
conscience with me not to see him, for I am permitted to do so. I
prefer not to buy that happiness by months of suffering. Ah, you
do not know what it costs me to reply to the question, 'Of what
are you thinking?' Certainly the mother of the novices has no
conception of the number and extent of the ideas which are rushing
through my mind when she asks that question. Sometimes I am seeing
Italy or Paris, with all its sights; always thinking, however, of
Calyste, who is"--she said this in that poetic way you know and
admire so much--"who is the sun of memory to me. I found," she
continued, "that I was too old to be received among the
Carmelites, and I have entered the order of Saint-Francois de
Sales solely because he said, 'I will bare your heads instead of
your feet,'--objecting, as he did, to austerities which mortified
the body only. It is, in truth, the head that sins. The saintly
bishop was right to make his rule austere toward the intellect,
and terrible against the will. That is what I sought; for my head
was the guilty part of me. It deceived me as to my heart until I
reached that fatal age of forty, when, for a few brief moments, we
are forty times happier than young women, and then, speedily,
fifty times more unhappy. But, my child, tell me," she asked,
ceasing with visible satisfaction to speak of herself, "are you
happy?"

"You see me under all the enchantments of love and happiness," I
answered.