--Thus do women love--without measure! often, too, they hate in the same way.--To this my correspondent adds further, that he could draw from the watering-village a whole protocol of depositions in evidence that the Parson's wife not merely always, but even on the present Ventose and Pluviose[80] day, was able to endure and live through it with the unvarnished composure of a Christian woman, if any one let anything fall, a cup or a word. For such a state of mind,--for apathy under the present, entire loss of a soup-tureen, or rinsing-bowl, or fruit-dish,--there is needed perhaps as much health as reason. --At last in the evening, the Page came in and said, Flamin was still in the garden. Victor received it, as if it were said to him, and went out carrying his oppressed heart to meet another troubled one: Flamin he found in an embowered nook staring up with all his eyes at the wax-image of the rejected friend; Victor's heart moved heavily as if through tears in his overladen breast. Flamin's face was covered, not with the panoply of wrath, but with the funeral veil of sorrow. For here in the foreground of a bright, warm youth, as it were on the classic soil of a former, irreplaceable love, he became too warm and too tender,--in the village he revoked his hardness in the city,--and what was still more, only friends of his friend, only affectionate eulogies on the despised darling, overwhelmed and warmed his impoverished heart, and he could here still more easily excuse than spare him. Victor welcomed him with the soft voice of a subdued heart, but he only half spoke either his thoughts or his words. Victor gazed deep down into the soul which mourned for friendship; for only a heart sees a heart; so only the great man sees great men, as one sees mountains only from mountains. He held it therefore as no sign of resentment, when Flamin slowly walked away from him; but he must needs, left so alone there, turn away his eyes from the consecrated corner of the garden, where their friendship had once opened its blossoms, and from the sacrificial bower where he had interceded with his father for Flamin's and Clotilda's union, and from the high observatory, the Tabor of friendship's transfiguration, from all these burial-places of a fairer time he must needs avert his eyes, in order to endure the poorer present. But that which he would not look upon, he represented so much the more vividly to his mind.