you! In you, who by a heartless falsehood--and nothing else,
nothing else, do you hear?--have brought me here, deceived,
cheated, as in some abominable farce!" She sat down on a boulder,
rested her chin in her hands, in the pose of simple grief--mourning
for herself.

"It only wanted this. Why! Oh! Why is it that ugliness,
ridicule, and baseness must fall across my path."

On that height, alone with the sky, they spoke to each other as if
the earth had fallen away from under their feet.

"Are you grieving for your dignity? He was a mediocre soul and
could have given you but an unworthy existence."

She did not even smile at those words, but, superb, as if lifting a
corner of the veil, she turned on him slowly.

"And do you imagine I would have devoted myself to him for such a
purpose! Don't you know that reparation was due to him from me? A
sacred debt--a fine duty. To redeem him would not have been in my
power--I know it. But he was blameless, and it was for me to come
forward. Don't you see that in the eyes of the world nothing could
have rehabilitated him so completely as his marriage with me? No
word of evil could be whispered of him after I had given him my
hand. As to giving myself up to anything less than the shaping of
a man's destiny--if I thought I could do it I would abhor myself. .
. ." She spoke with authority in her deep fascinating, unemotional
voice. Renouard meditated, gloomy, as if over some sinister riddle
of a beautiful sphinx met on the wild road of his life.