Villette

point with the accuracy and celerity of a machine.
    »Did I like the little book?« he now inquired.
    Suppressing a yawn, I said I hardly knew.
    »Had it moved me?«
    »I thought it had made me a little sleepy.«
    (After a pause) »Allons donc! It was of no use taking that tone with him. Bad as I was – and he should be sorry to have to name all my faults at a breath – God and nature had given me ›trop de sensibilité et de sympathie‹ not to be profoundly affected by an appeal so touching.«
    »Indeed!« I responded, rousing myself quickly, »I was not affected at all – not a whit.«
    And in proof, I drew from my pocket a perfectly dry handkerchief, still clean and in its folds.
    Hereupon I was made the object of a string of strictures rather piquant than polite. I listened with zest. After those two days of unnatural silence, it was better than music to hear M. Paul haranguing again just in his old fashion. I listened, and meantime solaced myself and Sylvie with the contents of a bonbonnière, which M. Emanuel's gifts kept well supplied with chocolate comfits. It pleased him to see even a small matter from his hand duly appreciated. He looked at me and the spaniel while we shared the spoil; he put up his penknife. Touching my hand with the bundle of new-cut quills, he said: –
    »Dîtes-donc, petite sœur – speak frankly – what have you thought of me during the last two days?«
    But of this question I would take no manner of notice; its purport made my eyes fill. I caressed Sylvie assiduously. M. Paul, leaning over the desk, bent towards us: –
    »I called myself your brother,« he said; »I hardly know what I am – brother – friend – I cannot tell. I know I think of you – I feel I wish you well – but I must check myself; you are to be feared. My best friends point out danger, and whisper caution.«
    »You do right to listen to your friends. By all means be cautious.«
    »It is your religion – your strange, self-reliant, invulnerable creed, whose influence seems to clothe you in, I know not what, unblessed panoply. You are good – Père Silas calls you good, and loves you – but your terrible, proud, earnest Protestantism, there is the danger. It expresses itself by your eye at times; and again, it gives you certain tones and certain gestures that make my flesh creep. You are not demonstrative, and yet, just now – when you handled that tract – my God! I thought Lucifer smiled.«
    »Certainly I don't respect that tract – what then?«
    »Not respect that tract? But it is the pure essence of faith, love, charity! I thought it would touch you: in its gentleness, I trusted that it could not fail. I laid it in your desk with a prayer. I must indeed be a sinner: Heaven will not hear the petitions that come warmest from my heart. You scorn my little offering. Oh, cela me fait mal!«
    »Monsieur, I don't scorn it – at least, not as your gift. Monsieur, sit down; listen to me. I am not a heathen, I am not hard-hearted, I am not unchristian, I am not dangerous, as they tell you; I would not trouble your faith; you believe in God and Christ and the Bible, and so do I.«
    »But
do
you believe in the Bible? Do you receive Revelation? What limits are there to the wild, careless daring of your country and sect? Père Silas dropped dark hints.«
    By dint of persuasion, I made him half-define these hints; they amounted to crafty Jesuit-slanders. That night M. Paul and I talked seriously and closely. He pleaded, he argued.
I
could not argue – a fortunate incapacity; it needed but triumphant, logical opposition to effect all the director wished to be effected; but I could talk in my own way – the way M. Paul was used to – and of which he could follow the meanderings and fill the hiatus, and pardon the strange stammerings, strange to him no longer. At ease with him, I could defend my creed and faith in my own fashion; in some degree I could lull his prejudices. He was not satisfied when he went away, hardly was he appeased; but he was made thoroughly to feel that Protestants were not necessarily the irreverent Pagans his director had insinuated; he was made to comprehend something of their mode of honouring the Light, the Life, the Word; he was enabled partly to perceive that, while their veneration for things venerable was not quite like that cultivated in his Church, it had its own, perhaps, deeper power – its own more solemn awe.
    I found that Père Silas (himself, I must repeat, not a bad