The sea, lighted by the moon, sparkled like
a mirror. A nightingale was singing in a tree. "Ah, there is the
poet!" thought Modeste, whose anger subsided at once. Bitter
reflections chased each other through her mind. She was cut to the
quick; she wished to re-read the letter, and lit a candle; she studied
the sentences so carefully studied when written; and ended by hearing
the wheezing voice of the outer world.
"He is right, and I am wrong," she said to herself. "But who could
ever believe that under the starry mantle of a poet I should find
nothing but one of Moliere's old men?"
When a woman or young girl is taken in the act, "flagrante delicto,"
she conceives a deadly hatred to the witness, the author, or the
object of her fault. And so the true, the single-minded, the untamed
and untamable Modeste conceived within her soul an unquenchable desire
to get the better of that righteous spirit, to drive him into some
fatal inconsistency, and so return him blow for blow. This girl, this
child, as we may call her, so pure, whose head alone had been
misguided,--partly by her reading, partly by her sister's sorrows, and
more perhaps by the dangerous meditations of her solitary life,--was
suddenly caught by a ray of sunshine flickering across her face.
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