“What a sentence!” cried Camille.  “Am I not a woman?  Do you think me an anomaly?”

“Possibly,” said Claude.

“We will see!” said the woman, stung to the quick.

“Farewell, my dear Camille; I leave to-morrow.  I am not angry with you, my dear; I think you the greatest of women, but if I continued to serve you as a screen, or a shield,” said Claude, with two significant inflections of his voice, “you would despise me.  We can part now without pain or remorse; we have neither happiness to regret nor hopes betrayed.  To you, as with some few but rare men of genius, love is not what Nature made it,—­an imperious need, to the satisfaction of which she attaches great and passing joys, which die.  You see love such as Christianity has created it,—­an ideal kingdom, full of noble sentiments, of grand weaknesses, poesies, spiritual sensations, devotions of moral fragrance, entrancing harmonies, placed high above all vulgar coarseness, to which two creatures as one angel fly on the wings of pleasure.  This is what I hoped to share; I thought I held in you a key to that door, closed to so many, by which we may advance toward the infinite.  You were there already.  In this you have misled me.  I return to my misery,—­to my vast prison of Paris.  Such a deception as this, had it come to me earlier in life, would have made me flee from existence; to-day it puts into my soul a disenchantment which will plunge me forever into an awful solitude.  I am without the faith which helped the Fathers to people theirs with sacred images.  It is to this, my dear Camille, to this that the superiority of our mind has brought us; we may, both of us, sing that dreadful hymn which a poet has put into the mouth of Moses speaking to the Almighty:  ’Lord God, Thou hast made me powerful and solitary.’”

At this moment Calyste appeared.

“I ought not to leave you ignorant that I am here,” he said.

Mademoiselle des Touches showed the utmost fear; a sudden flush colored her impassible face with tints of fire.  During this strange scene she was more beautiful than at any other moment of her life.

“We thought you gone, Calyste,” said Claude.  “But this involuntary discretion on both sides will do no harm; perhaps, indeed, you may be more at your ease at Les Touches by knowing Felicite as she is.  Her silence shows me I am not mistaken as to the part she meant me to play.  As I told you before, she loves you, but it is for yourself, not for herself,—­a sentiment that few women are able to conceive and practise; few among them know the voluptuous pleasure of sufferings born of longing,—­that is one of the magnificent passions reserved for man.  But she is in some sense a man,” he added, sardonically.  “Your love for Beatrix will make her suffer and make her happy too.”