“Ah! my dear, you are taking him a long journey in a small space,” said Mademoiselle des Touches one day.

Before the excursion to Croisic, the two women were discoursing one evening about love, and laughing at the different ways that men adopted to declare it; admitting to themselves that the cleverest men, and naturally the least loving, did not like to wander in the labyrinths of sentimentality and went straight to the point,—­in which perhaps they were right; for the result was that those who loved most deeply and reservedly were, for a time at least, ill-treated.

“They go to work like La Fontaine, when he wanted to enter the Academy,” said Camille.

Madame de Rochefide had unbounded power to restrain Calyste within the limits where she meant to keep him; it sufficed her to remind him by a look or gesture of his horrible violence on the rocks.  The eyes of her poor victim would fill with tears, he was silent, swallowing down his prayers, his arguments, his sufferings with a heroism that would certainly have touched any other woman.  She finally brought him by her infernal coquetry to such a pass that he went one day to Camille imploring her advice.

Beatrix, armed with Calyste’s own letter, quoted the passage in which he said that to love was the first happiness, that of being loved came later; and she used that axiom to restrain his passion to the limits of respectful idolatry, which pleased her well.  She liked to feel her soul caressed by those sweet hymns of praise and adoration which nature suggests to youth; in them is so much artless art; such innocent seduction is in their cries, their prayers, their exclamations, their pledges of themselves in the promissory notes which they offer on the future; to all of which Beatrix was very careful to give no definite answer.  Yes, she heard him; but she doubted!  Love was not yet the question; what he asked of her was permission to love.  In fact, that was all the poor lad really asked for; his mind still clung to the strongest side of love, the spiritual side.  But the woman who is firmest in words is often the feeblest in action.  It is strange that Calyste, having seen the progress his suit had made by pushing Beatrix into the sea, did not continue to urge it violently.  But love in young men is so ecstatic and religious that their inmost desire is to win its fruition through moral conviction.  In that is the sublimity of their love.

Nevertheless the day came when the Breton, driven to desperation, complained to Camille of Beatrix’s conduct.

“I meant to cure you by making you quickly understand her,” replied Mademoiselle des Touches; “but you have spoiled all.  Ten days ago you were her master; to-day, my poor boy, you are her slave.  You will never have the strength now to do as I advise.”

“What ought I to do?”

“Quarrel with her on the ground of her hardness.  A woman is always over-excited when she discusses; let her be angry and ill-treat you, and then stay away; do not return to Les Touches till she herself recalls you.”