by Henry James

“ He had hoped that when he should fall "really" in love he should do it with an excellent conscience, with plenty of confidence and joy, doubtless, but no strange soreness, no pangs nor regrets. Here was a sentiment concocted of pity and anger as well as of admiration, and bristling with scruples and doubts and fears. He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others, but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as the lonely lady of Saint-Germain? ”

“ As I see it you should have found happiness serene, profound, complete; a femme de chambre not a jewel perhaps, but warranted to tell but one fib a day; a society possibly rather provincial, but--in spite of your poor opinion of mankind--a good deal of solid virtue; jealousies and vanities very tame, and no particular iniquities and adulteries. A husband," he added after a moment--"a husband of your own faith and race and spiritual substance, who would have loved you well." ”

“ But she had no sooner uttered these words than she laughed all amicably, as if to mitigate their too personal application.
"Heaven forbid one should do that unless one has something better to offer," Longmore returned. "And yet I'm haunted by the dream of a life in which you should have found no compromises, for they're a perversion of natures that tend only to goodness and rectitude. ”

“ I found during those dreary days in Paris that the thing in life I most care for is this daily privilege of seeing you. I know it's very brutal to tell you I admire you; it's an insult to you to treat you as if you had complained to me or appealed to me. But such a friendship as I waked up to there"--and he tossed his head toward the distant city--"is a potent force, I assure you. When forces are stupidly stifled they explode. ”

“ Our young man too, if he had been so disposed, would have been the more free to give her all his attention that her own was fixed upon the person facing her. She was what the French call a belle brune, and though Longmore, who had rather a conservative taste in such matters, was but half-charmed by her bold outlines and even braver complexion, he couldn't help admiring her expression of basking contentment. ”

“ Longmore," she said, "why you've come back." He inclined himself to her, almost pulling up again, with an air that startled her into a certainty of what she had feared. "Because I've learned the real answer to the question I asked you the other day. You're not happy--you're too good to be happy on the terms offered you. Madame de Mauves," he went on with a gesture which protested against a gesture of her own, "I can't be happy, you know, when you're as little so as I make you out. I don't care for anything so long as I only feel helpless and sore about you. ”

“ You're truth itself, and there's no truth about you. You believe in purity and duty and dignity, and you live in a world in which they're daily belied. I ask myself with vain rage how you ever came into such a world, and why the perversity of fate never let me know you before. ”

“ Visions are vain things; we must make the best of the reality we happen to be in for."
"And yet," said Longmore, provoked by what seemed the very wantonness of her patience, "the reality YOU 'happen to be in for' has, if I'm not in error, very recently taken a shape that keenly tests your philosophy." ”

“ But what particular group of people is worth pinning one's faith upon? I confess it sometimes seems to me men and women are very poor creatures. I suppose I'm too romantic and always was. I've an unfortunate taste for poetic fitness. Life's hard prose, and one must learn to read prose contentedly. I believe I once supposed all the prose to be in America, which was very foolish. ”

“ I should have preferred to go quite into the country, into Auvergne, where my husband has a house. But to him Paris in some degree is necessary, and Saint-Germain has been a conscious compromise."
"A conscious compromise!" Longmore expressively repeated. "That's your whole life."
"It's the life of many people," she made prompt answer--"of most people of quiet tastes, and it's certainly better than acute distress. One's at a loss theoretically to defend compromises ”