emanation of her graceful and wholesome nature.

This state of feeling began to act like an obsession, a sort of
witchcraft, which alarmed him. What was she really, this strange
creature? A peasant indeed, apparently; but there was also something
more refined and cultivated about her, due, doubtless, to her having
received her education in a city school. She both felt and expressed
herself differently from ordinary country girls, although retaining the
frankness and untutored charm of rustic natures. She exercised an uneasy
fascination over Julien, and at times he returned to the superstitious
impression made upon him by Reine's behavior and discourse in the forest.
He again questioned with himself whether this female form, in its untamed
beauty, did not enfold some spirit of temptation, some insidious fairy,
similar to the Melusine, who appeared to Count Raymond in the forest of
Poitiers.

Most of the time he would himself laugh at this extravagant supposition,
but, while endeavoring to make light of his own cowardice, the idea still
haunted and tormented him. Sometimes, in the effort to rid himself of
the persistence of his own imagination, he would try to exorcise the
demon who had got hold of him, and this exorcism consisted in despoiling
the image of his temptress of the veil of virginal purity with which his
admiration had first invested her. Who could assure him, after all, that
this girl, with her independent ways, living alone at her farm, running
through the woods at all hours, was as irreproachable as he had imagined?
In the village, certainly, she was respected by all; but people were very
tolerant--very easy, in fact--on the question of morals in this district,
where the gallantries of Claude de Buxieres were thought quite natural,
where the illegitimacy of Claudet offended no one's sense of the
proprieties, and where the after-dinner conversations, among the class