Your charm comes from mystery; it is abstract, not active.
Your strength repulses men of strength who fear a struggle. Your power
may please young souls, like that of Calyste, which like to be
protected; though, even them it wearies in the long run. You are
grand, and you are sublime; bear with the consequence of those two
qualities--they fatigue."
"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.
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