episode. One day, after putting me down at the corner of a street, she
offered me her hand, and detained me by a slight pressure, for a moment.
While the husband sat motionless and looking straight before him, she
leaned forward in the carriage to say, with just a shade of warning in
her leisurely tone: "Il faut, cependant, faire attention a ne pas gater
sa vie." I had never seen her face so close to mine before. She made
my heart beat, and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole evening.
Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's life. But
she did not know--nobody could know--how impossible that danger seemed
to me.


Chapter VII.

Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a cold
suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on Political
Economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible? Would it be right?
With my feet on the very shores of the sea and about to embrace my
blue-eyed dream, what could a good-natured warning as to spoiling one's
life mean to my youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the
last too of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very
bizarre--and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my enchantress,
like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance. But I was not so
callous or so stupid as not to recognise there also the voice of
kindness. And then the vagueness of the warning--because what can be the
meaning of the phrase: to spoil one's life?--arrested one's attention
by its air of wise profundity. At any rate, as I have said before,
the words of la belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole
evening. I tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion
of life as an enterprise that could be mismanaged. But I left off being