But where is the beginning of our acts? The thread of our fate, when we try to lay it bare, is like one of those plants that cannot be torn up with all its roots. Should Thérèse go back to her childhood? But childhood itself is an end and a fulfilment. * * * * * Thérèse’s childhood;--snow at the source of a stream now utterly defiled. At school she appeared to live aloof from those petty tragedies that tormented her companions. The mistresses often held up Thérèse Larroque as an example to the rest. “Thérèse,” one of them said, “is an unusually high moral type: she knows it: and her pride in that fact is quite enough to keep her straight without any fear of punishment.” “But was I happy?” Thérèse asked herself. “And was I sincere? All my life before my marriage has, as I look back on it, this air of innocence, in contrast, no doubt, to the ineffaceable contamination of my marriage. My life at school, before I became a wife and a mother, seems a paradise, though I did not realise it then. How could I know that in those years before my life began I was living my real life? Pure I was: an angel if you like: but a very passionate angel! Whatever my mistresses may have said, I knew what suffering was and I made others feel it. I enjoyed the pain I gave and the pain that my friends inflicted: my suffering was a pure emotion, untainted by remorse: and indeed, there was pain and joy in most simple pleasures.” But Thérèse was satisfied if she could feel herself worthy of Anne when she met her once more in the summer heats, under the oak trees of Argelouse. She must be able to say to this little offspring of the Convent: “I can be as pure as you are without all those wreaths and ribbons.” Besides, Anne de la Trave’s purity was mainly ignorance. The ladies of the Sacré-Cœur drew many veils between their little charges and the world. Thérèse despised them for confusing virtue and ignorance. “You don’t know anything about life, darling,” she used often to say, in those far-off summers at Argelouse. Those lovely summers; Thérèse, as she sat in the little train, that had at last begun to move, realised that she must go back to them if she was to get a clear view of what had happened. It is incredible, but true, that in those pure dawns of our lives the most dreadful storms are already threatening in the distance. Those azure mornings are an evil omen for the weather of the afternoon and evening. They portend wrecked flower-beds, broken branches, and muddy ruin everywhere. Thérèse did not reflect, or come to a decision at any period of her life; there were no sharp turnings; she went down an imperceptible slope, gradually at first, and then faster. The lost woman of this evening was identical with the radiant creature of those summers at Argelouse, where she was now returning in secret and under cover of the night.