“I almost get to like my name when I hear it on your lips. Do you know what my chief horror was at home? The luxury. So much comfort, so many facilities.... I felt myself becoming an anarchist. Now, on the contrary, I think I’m veering toward conservatism. I realized that the other day because of the indignation that seized me when I heard the tourist at the frontier speak of his pleasure in cheating the customs. ‘Robbing the State is robbing no one,’ he said. My feeling of antagonism made me suddenly understand what the State was. And I began to have an affection for it, simply because it was being injured. I had never thought about it before. ‘The State is nothing but a convention,’ he said, too. What a fine thing a convention would be that rested on the bona fides of every individual! ... if only there were nothing but honest folk. Why, if anyone were to ask me to-day what virtue I considered the finest, I should answer without hesitation--honesty. Oh, Laura! I should like all my life long, at the very smallest shock, to ring true, with a pure, authentic sound. Nearly all the people I have known ring false. To be worth exactly what one seems to be worth--not to try to seem to be worth more.... One wants to deceive people, and one is so much occupied with seeming, that one ends by not knowing what one really is.... Forgive me for talking like this. They are my last night’s reflections.” “You were thinking of the little coin you showed us yesterday. When I go away....” She could not finish her sentence; the tears rose to her eyes and in the effort she made to keep them back, Bernard saw her lips tremble. “Then you are going away, Laura ...” he went on sadly. “I am afraid that when I no longer feel you near me, I shall be worth nothing at all--or hardly anything.... But, tell me--I should like to ask you ... would you be going away--would you have made this confession, if Edouard ... I don’t know how to say it ...” (and as Laura blushed), “if Edouard had been worth more? Oh, don’t protest. I know so well what you think of him.” “You say that, because yesterday you caught me smiling at what he said; you immediately jumped to the conclusion that we were judging him in the same way. But it’s not so. Don’t deceive yourself. In reality I don’t know what I think of him. He is never the same for long together. He is attached to nothing, but nothing is more attractive than his elusiveness. He is perpetually forming, unforming, re-forming himself. One thinks one has grasped him.... Proteus! He takes the shape of what he loves, and oneself must love him to understand him.” “You love him. Oh, Laura! it’s not of Douviers I feel jealous, nor of Vincent; it’s of Edouard.” “Why jealous? I love Douviers; I love Edouard, but differently. If I am to love you, it must be with yet another love.”