Rosette--as we have agreed to call her that--is a very bright woman and has a most admirable appreciation of man; although she postponed the end of the chapter for some time, I did not once lose my temper with her: which is really marvellous, for you know how I fly into a passion when I don't get what I want on the instant, and when a woman goes beyond the time I have mentally allowed her in which to surrender.--I have no idea how she did it at the first interview; she gave me to understand that I should have her, and I was surer of her than if I had had her written promise signed by her hand. You will say perhaps that her bold and free-and-easy manners left the field free to rash hopes. I do not think that that is the real motive: I have seen some women whose prodigious freedom of manner excluded the last vestige of doubt, who did not produce that effect upon me, and in whose presence I was conscious of a timidity and uneasiness that were, to say the least, misplaced. The result is, generally speaking, that I am less amiable with the woman I long to possess than with those who are indifferent to me; it is because of the excitement of waiting for an opportunity and my uncertainty as to the success of my project; that makes me gloomy and casts me into a fit of musing which takes away much of my power of pleasing and my presence of mind. When I see the hours I had set aside for another purpose passing one by one, I am filled with anger in spite of myself, and I cannot keep from saying very sharp, harsh things, which sometimes go as far as brutality and put my affair back a hundred leagues. With Rosette I had no such feeling; never, even at the moment when she resisted me most stubbornly, did I have the idea that she wanted to escape from my love. I calmly allowed her to display all her little coquetries, and I endured in patience the overlong delays to which it pleased her to subject my ardor; there was something smiling in her harshness that consoled you for it as much as possible, and in her most Hyrcanian cruelties you could distinguish a background of humanity that made it impossible for you to have any very serious fear.--Virtuous women, even when they are not really virtuous at all, have a crabbed, disdainful way which is perfectly unendurable to me. They have the air of being always ready to ring and order their footmen to put you out; and it seems to me, really, that a man who takes the trouble to pay court to a woman--and it isn't always as agreeable as you may think--doesn't deserve to be looked at in that way.