The fancies of women are not
the action of the mind; they are of the heart. You have come just in
time; solitude is bad for me. I am not the dupe of his professed
desire to go to Croisic and see the rocks and the dunes and the
salt-marshes without me. He meant to leave us alone together; he is
jealous, or, rather, he pretends jealousy, and you are young, you are
handsome."
"Why not have told me this before? What must I do? must I stay away?"
asked Calyste, with difficulty restraining his tears, one of which
rolled down his cheek and touched Felicite deeply.
"You are an angel!" she cried. Then she gaily sang the "Stay! stay!"
of Matilde in "Guillaume Tell," taking all gravity from that
magnificent answer of the princess to her subject. "He only wants to
make me think he loves me better than he really does," she said. "He
knows how much I desire his happiness," she went on, looking
attentively at Calyste. "Perhaps he feels humiliated to be inferior to
me there. Perhaps he has suspicions about you and means to surprise
us. But even if his only crime is to take his pleasure without me, and
not to associate me with the ideas this new place gives him, is not
that enough? Ah! I am no more loved by that great brain than I was by
the musician, by the poet, by the soldier! Sterne is right; names
signify much; mine is a bitter sarcasm.
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