He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure of making
_tete-a-tete_ excursions, though, instead of mountains and glacers and
the wide blue lake, we had to content ourselves with mere slopes and
ponds and artificial plantations. The years had changed us both, but
with what different result! Meunier was now a brilliant figure in
society, to whom elegant women pretended to listen, and whose
acquaintance was boasted of by noblemen ambitious of brains. He
repressed with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of the shock which I am
sure he must have received from our meeting, or of a desire to penetrate
into my condition and circumstances, and sought by the utmost exertion of
his charming social powers to make our reunion agreeable. Bertha was
much struck by the unexpected fascinations of a visitor whom she had
expected to find presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and put
forth all her coquetries and accomplishments. Apparently she succeeded
in attracting his admiration, for his manner towards her was attentive
and flattering. The effect of his presence on me was so benignant,
especially in those renewals of our old _tete-a-tete_ wanderings, when he
poured forth to me wonderful narratives of his professional experience,
that more than once, when his talk turned on the psychological relations
of disease, the thought crossed my mind that, if his stay with me were
long enough, I might possibly bring myself to tell this man the secrets
of my lot. Might there not lie some remedy for me, too, in his science?
Might there not at least lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me
in his large and susceptible mind? But the thought only flickered feebly
now and then, and died out before it could become a wish. The horror I
had of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an
irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around
my own, as we automatically perform the gesture we feel to be wanting in
another.