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Updated: May 13, 2025
Love, resting on their young and tender lives, makes them more tender yet, like the light that lingers long and fondly upon a soft-tinted pastel. Next comes the turn of Marcienne, who, greatly daring, has broken with her family and given up worldly luxury, to work and live freely with the man of her choice.
Marcienne continued, still addressing herself to my new friend: "Do you see those pretty creatures in white, standing close to Hermione? They are two orphans, two girls who fell in love with the same man. I don't know the details of the romance, nor can I say whether it was fancy or passion that guided the man's choice. All I know is that he loved one of them and had a child by her.
A flutter of silk, a gleam of a silver-white skirt in the waning light, a whiff of orris-root; and Marcienne glides down to our feet with a lithe, cat-like movement. In a curt, passionate tone, she says: "You are speaking of Hermione. Oh, do try and persuade her sister not to go the same way: is not one enough? Must more loveliness be wasted?"
The fair Marcienne herself, whom I love for her passionate pride, is sitting near the fire-place; and her wonderful profile stands out against the flames. Her mouth is a fierce red; but the figure which shows through the pale-coloured tailor-made dress is full of tender childish curves. The swansdown toque makes her black hair seem blacker still.
I began to laugh: "Alas, I would not dare to say that the wisest among us, in extolling our own sex, are not once more seeking the admiration of some man!" And Marcienne, who has been to such pains to release herself from the worldly surroundings amid which she suffered, goes on speaking long and passionately.
The way in which we bear those dangers and return from those roads: that is where the interest begins!" "But, tell me," murmurs Cecilia, "what does your Hermione want?" "Here is her story, in a couple of words," says Marcienne. "She is rich, beautiful and talented; and she belongs to an aristocratic English family.
For our souls are such sensitive instruments that they can rarely strike as much as a true third. Blanche, with the agate eyes and the cloud of chestnut hair, is a picture of autumn in the brown and red of her frock, with its bands of sable. She is listening attentively to Marcienne.
I insisted: "If women often have so much difficulty in learning to know their own characters, it is because most men are scornful mirrors, occupied with nothing smaller than the universe and never dreaming of reflecting women except in a grudging and imperfect fashion." "It is true," said Marcienne, thinking of her lover, a man whose domineering temper often made him unjust to her.
"And yet is there not an intimate relation between a woman's work and her appearance?" "That is the reason, no doubt," replied Marcienne, "why it seems, unlike man's, to grow smaller as it passes out of the present. We see the immortal pages disappear like the fallen petals of a flower. It's sad, don't you think?" Struck with the beauty of her closing words, we listened to her in silence.
The conversation then assumed a more personal character, each of us thinking of the well-beloved: Marcienne, ever mournful and passionate; the gentle Blanche, anxious, secretly plighted to an absent lover; and Cecilia, all absorbed in her young happiness with the husband of her choice. Hermione and her cluster of girls had gradually come nearer.
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