"I think you are both enlightened and at the same time blinded by your love," he said to her with some coldness. "Your conduct to-day has been admirable, but is it prudent for us to try and see each other to-night? This house is paved with enemies. Just think of Elisa's passionate hatred for me." "That hate is very like the passionate indifference which you no doubt have for me." "Even if I were indifferent I ought to save you from the peril in which I have plunged you. If chance so wills it that M. de Rênal should speak to Elisa, she can acquaint him with everything in a single word. What is to prevent him from hiding near my room fully armed?" "What, not even courage?" said Madame de Rênal, with all the haughtiness of a scion of nobility. "I will never demean myself to speak about my courage," said Julien, coldly, "it would be mean to do so. Let the world judge by the facts. But," he added, taking her hand, "you have no idea how devoted I am to you and how over-joyed I am of being able to say good-bye to you before this cruel separation." CHAPTER XXII MANNERS OF PROCEDURE IN 1830 Speech has been given to man to conceal his thought. _R.P. Malagrida_. Julien had scarcely arrived at Verrières before he reproached himself with his injustice towards Madame de Rênal. "I should have despised her for a weakling of a woman if she had not had the strength to go through with her scene with M. de Rênal. But she has acquitted herself like a diplomatist and I sympathise with the defeat of the man who is my enemy. There is a bourgeois prejudice in my action; my vanity is offended because M. de Rênal is a man. Men form a vast and illustrious body to which I have the honour to belong. I am nothing but a fool." M. Chélan had refused the magnificent apartments which the most important Liberals in the district had offered him, when his loss of his living had necessitated his leaving the parsonage. The two rooms which he had rented were littered with his books. Julien, wishing to show Verrières what a priest could do, went and fetched a dozen pinewood planks from his father, carried them on his back all along the Grande-Rue, borrowed some tools from an old comrade and soon built a kind of book-case in which he arranged M. Chélan's books. "I thought you were corrupted by the vanity of the world," said the old man to him as he cried with joy, "but this is something which well redeems all the childishness of that brilliant Guard of Honour uniform which has made you so many enemies."