Perhaps I was mistaken and imagined that I saw what did not really exist, but it seemed to me that Théodore had noticed my passion, although you may be sure I have never lisped a word of it, and that, through the veil of those borrowed expressions, behind that stage-mask, in those hermaphroditic words, he was alluding to his real sex and to our reciprocal positions. It is impossible that so bright a woman as she is, who knows so much of the world as she, should not have detected from the very first what was going on in my heart:--in default of my tongue, my eyes and my mental disturbance have spoken loud enough, and the veil of warm friendship which I had thrown over my love was not so impenetrable that a watchful and interested observer could not easily look through it.--The most innocent and least experienced girl on earth would not have been deceived by it for one moment. Some important motive, doubtless, which I may not know, compels the beauty to adopt this infernal disguise, which has been the cause of all my suffering and has been on the verge of making me a strange sort of lover: except for that, everything would have run as smoothly and easily as a carriage whose wheels are well greased, over a level road covered with fine gravel; I could have abandoned myself in sweet security to the most amorously vagabond reveries and have taken my divinity's little soft white hand in mine without shuddering with horror and recoiling twenty paces as if I had been touched with a red-hot iron, or felt the claws of Beelzebub in person. Instead of falling into despair and raging inwardly like a genuine maniac, of beating my breast because I could not escape remorse, and lamenting because I had none, I should have said to myself with a feeling of duty well done and conscience satisfied:--"I am in love!"--a sentence as agreeable to say to one's self in the morning, under nice warm bedclothes with your head on a soft pillow, as any other conceivable sentence of the same length--always excepting this: "I have money." After leaving my bed I could have taken my place in front of my mirror, and there, looking at myself with a sort of respect, I should have been touched, as I combed my hair, by my poetic pallor, promising myself that I would turn it to good advantage and make the most of it, for nothing is so low as to make love with a scarlet face; and when one has the ill-luck to be red-faced and in love, as may happen, I am of the opinion that he should have his face powdered every day or else renounce all idea of gentility in his appearance and turn his attention to the Margots and Toinons. Then I could have breakfasted with suitable gravity, in order to nourish this dear body, this precious casket of passion, to manufacture with the juice of meats and game, good, amorous chyle and warm, quick blood, and to maintain it in a condition to give pleasure to charitable souls.